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The Toronto Sun DATE: 2006.01.25 EDITION: Final SECTION: News PAGE: 6 BYLINE: MARK BONOKOSKI COLUMN: Page Six WORD COUNT: 816 ILLUSTRATION: 1. photo 2. photo of DAVID MILLER Not quite half of guns on the street. Despite what the mayor and the recently deposed PM would have us believe, the numbers don't add up. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE REAL STORY ON HOW ALL THOSE CRIME GUNS GOT ONTO TORONTO STREETS -- AND THEY'RE NOT FROM THE HOMES OF LEGITIMATE OWNERS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Having invoked the fear factor that half the guns used to bathe Toronto in blood last year were stolen from law-abiding collectors and shooters, Prime Minister Paul Martin went to the polls Monday vowing to ban all handguns in Canada -- if constitutionally viable, that is, a caveat he later had to add when he misfired on the facts. Toronto Mayor David Miller sang the same statistical tune, despite contrary evidence in a report tabled last month by his own police service -- a report obtained through access to information that shows, if not twisted, that no more than 16% of "crime guns" in Toronto were obtained through the robbery of legitimate owners. And that is a far, far cry from the loud headlines Mayor Miller recently created when he claimed "almost half" the blood guns came from the break-ins of homes where guns were legally registered and stored. But politics is politics. And Mayor Miller, without question, wanted the Liberals back in power. Back on Jan. 10, Saskatchewan Tory MP Garry Breitkreuz, the most vocal critic of $2 billion-plus poured into a dysfunctional national gun registry, issued a press released based on an academic analysis of Toronto gun-crime statistics prepared by Dr. Gary Mauser, a professor at the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies at British Columbia's Simon Fraser University. And it got virtually no media attention. The office of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, however, must have seen the inevitable coming when it received an access for information request from Dr. Mauser regarding a Toronto Police Service report to the police board dated Dec. 1, 2005. For this was what appeared in the preamble. "The information that Chief Blair received was not based on a scientific analysis of raw date, but rather the estimate of an experienced police officer," the writer stated, his name and position blacked out. RAISE TENSION The writer was also quick to note that Chief Blair received this information "verbally." It was this document, however, which Mayor Miller obviously used to raise the pre-election tension levels. The file Dr. Mauser analyzed -- and Mayor Miller used to invoke the fear factor -- consisted of a review of the 214 handguns which fell into the hands of the Toronto Police guns and gangs task force during 2004. Of those guns in police possession, 82 were confirmed as traceable to the United States, 26 were not registered (meaning they had not come from legal gun owners), six were deemed "too old to trace," and 65 were categorized as "unknown status, serial (number) removed." That's 179 of the 214 guns seized. The remaining 35 -- or 16% -- had been reported stolen, as required by law, by law-abiding citizens who had legally purchased and registered their weapons. So how did Mayor Miller, through this report, come up with "almost half" the crime guns in this city as coming from domestic break-ins? Well, the six guns supposedly "too old to trace" were given Canadian origins, as were the 26 "not registered," as were 36 of the 65 guns supposedly deemed to have an "unknown status" because they had their serial numbers filed off. Add to that the 35 legally-registered handguns that responsible and law-abiding collectors or target shooters had reported stolen, and its adds up to 103 guns. STATS SKEWED That's how Mayor Miller got his "almost half" -- by using the Toronto Police Services Board's report and giving Canadian citizenship to 68 weapons of dubious or uncertain origins when, in fact, only 35 of the 214 handguns seized in total can be honestly traced to being stolen from a legitimate handgun collector or target shooter. Without those 68 weapons, however, there is no fear factor to trigger, and therefore no self-serving politics to put into play as part of an election platform. And so the stats found themselves getting skewed. According to Dr. Mauser, what rarely -- if ever -- gets reported is the number of weapons with military or police origins which fall into criminal hands. But, through Access to Information, this is what Mauser discovered, and published in his study. On July 4, 2002, an RCMP report listed 409 firearms that had been either lost or stolen from the Canadian military, a list that included 218 Lee Enfield rifles and a number of machine guns. But there were also 17 sidearms reported stolen or missing -- all Browning 9mm pistols, a preferred street piece. None of this ever made the news. A year earlier, according to the most-recent information obtained by Mauser, the RCMP itself had to confess to 16 handguns being stolen, and two handguns being lost. As it stands today, the police -- regardless of jurisdiction -- are not required to register their guns and the Department of National Defence is totally exempt from all registration requirements. Nor is the RCMP or the Canadian Firearms Centre required to collect information on the number of firearms either stolen or missing from any police force in Canada -- from Victoria, B.C., to St. John's, Nfld. In his report, Mauser said it was unfortunate that the Toronto Police Service report provided no information regarding how many "crime guns" had their origins either at some military armoury or at a Canadian police service. VICTIMIZED "This is especially disturbing in the light of international reports that a large percentage of 'crime guns' have been diverted from police and military supplies," wrote Mauser. "The Canadian government reports are incomplete, but partial figures show that the Canadian police or military have reported that they have lost or had stolen over 500 guns." In the meantime, legitimate gun owners who have been victimized by gangs and bandits continue to make the headlines as if they are the criminals, with the main men wanting to bring them down with pre-election rhetoric being the prime minister of this country and the mayor of this city. The election, however, is now over. Wait to hear if silence will now follow. _________________________________________________________________________ NEWS RELEASE - January
10, 2006 |