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Numbers don't lie

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Last Monday in this space, I wrote that Canada should not consider banning guns in light of last month's Dawson College shootings. Many commentators and politicians, particularly in urban centres, have been calling for a prohibition on the civilian ownership of guns. "Why does anyone other a soldier or police officer need a weapon?," has been a common refrain.

I asked why take the legal property of law-abiding citizens when there is every reason to believe such a confiscation will have no beneficial impact on gun crime?

Gun bans in Australia and the United Kingdom have failed to lower crime rates in those countries and there is no reason to believe a ban here would work any better. Upwards of 90% of gun crimes are committed with illegal guns, by criminals, not by the neighbour with a high-powered hunting rifle.

Criminals will not observe a gun ban any more than they have mandatory registration.

In response, Philip Alpers, a adjunct assistant professor at the University of Sydney's school of public health, wrote imploring Canadians not to be "misled by the gun lobby myth that firearm-related crime in Australia increased after sweeping gun controls were introduced."

Interestingly, all the Australian numbers I used came from the Australian Bureau of Statistics -- their StatsCan -- and the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, public agencies that are hardly propaganda central for the "gun lobby." To bolster his claim that "Australia's tightened gun laws were followed by notable reductions in gun death and gun crime," Mr. Alpers then engages in misdirection.

First, he points out that in the 10 years before the gun-law change in 1996, "Australia suffered 11 mass shootings (five or more victims)," but none in the 10 years since.

This is true, but largely irrelevant. Very few victims of gun crime are killed or wounded in mass shootings, which are thankfully rare and largely the product of disturbed minds rather than the legal availability of guns. Such incidents grab a lot of media attention, but the gun crimes most people are (rightly) worried about are acquaintance murders, armed robberies and home invasions.

My point, which Mr. Alpers did not even address, was that while gun crimes in Australia are now noticeably lower than in 1996, shooting incidents of the kind most people worry about actually rose by more than two-thirds in the five years following the gun ban, and only declined after 2001 because of increased police vigilance concerning street crimes, gun smuggling and drug dealing.

Again, those were not "gun lobby myths," but Australian government statistics. Mr. Alpers then pulled a switch common among gun control advocates. He began talking about "firearm fatalities" rather than firearms homicides. Fatalities include suicides by firearm and accidental shootings, not just murders.

Like Mr. Alpers, Canada's gun control lobby likes to cite declines in suicides involving guns as proof that strict new laws introduced in both countries in the 1990s are having beneficial effects. The trouble is, overall suicide rates in both countries have not fallen -- or have fallen only a little -- during the lifetime of these laws; meaning, while there may have been fewer firearms suicides, at best there have been only marginally fewer total suicides.

In Canada, for instance, since our latest gun laws were introduced in 1995, gun suicides have fallen by more than a quarter, but suicides by hanging have risen by more than 50%, fully offsetting the drop in gun suicides. People are still killing themselves at similar rates, they are just not using guns as often to do it.

In Australia, firearms suicide rates are now nearly as high again as they were before the gun ban of 1996. They are higher than they were in 1990, when Australian gun laws were relatively lax compared to today.

Gun laws haven't stopped gun crimes, nor have they even discouraged troubled individuals from taking their own lives. At best, they have simply forced those seeking an end to find other methods of doing so. And unless you believe a gun suicide is somehow worse than one using pills, car exhaust or rope, you could hardly consider this "substitutive effect" a great success for gun control.

Gun control is not crime control, no matter how fervently gun control advocates such as Mr. Alpers want to believe it is.

lgunter@shaw.ca