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National Post -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Handgun Ban Won't Work -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nearly 340,000 Canadians -- about 1% of the population -- were victims of violent crime in 2006, according to a Statistics Canada study released in late February. But just 8,100 were victims of a violent crime committed with a gun. If you were the victim of a gun crime, it's probably no comfort to know you were one of "just" 8,100. Still, despite the hype, gun crime is not statistically a serious problem in Canada. Banning guns, or even restricting their use more closely, will have no appreciable impact on rates of violent crime. Knives are used in nearly three times as many violent crimes as guns, yet no one calls for a knife registry. Even blunt instruments are used more often than guns without demands that government licences be required before one may buy baseball bats and lead pipes. So why do liberal-left politicians expend so much energy trying to restrict gun ownership or even ban guns outright? The principal reason, of course, is that modern liberalism is the victory of symbolism over substance. A public policy or law is seldom designed mostly to solve an identified problem. Its primary purpose is to reflect well on the good intentions of the person or group proposing it. So what if laws and social programs produce no tangible benefits? They remain on the statute books and retain full funding -- complete with massive bureaucracies -- because they enable liberals to convince themselves something is being done. Activity is confused with achievement. Gun control is constantly put forward by intellectually lazy politicians and do-gooder activists because attempting to restrict gun ownership is easier than taking on real criminals. More importantly, anti-gun laws enable politicians and activists to claim they are doing something to cure a problem that concerns voters and donors, even though restricting gun ownership among law-abiding citizens has no mitigating effect on violent crime. Mandatory minimum sentences for guns crimes -- of the kind favoured by Conservative politicians -- may have little impact on violent crime rates, too. The number of violent gun crimes is small. A one-quarter or one-third reduction in gun crime would produce a negligible reduction in the overall rate of violent crime. But at least mandatory sentences for using a gun punish only the guilty. And a one-quarter to one-third reduction in gun crime means 2,000 to 2,500 fewer victims. On the other hand, restrictive gun laws punish an entire class of people -- law-abiding hunters, target shooters and gun collectors -- for the actions of others and are never likely to reduce victimization. StatsCan has reported that "handguns made up nearly two-thirds of all firearms used" for violent crimes. This is significant because for more than 70 years, it has been the law in Canada to register all handguns. If registration were an effective method for reducing crime, handgun crime would be nonexistent. Instead, handguns are far and away the most common crime-guns and their use is growing. So if registering handguns will never reduce crime, perhaps banning them would. That is the solution proposed by Ontario's Liberal government and Toronto's Mayor, David Miller. Again, this is attacking the problem in a way that will never solve it. The simple fact is that most crime-guns -- especially criminal handguns -- are not legally owned now. They have never been registered. Their existence is unknown to police. They do not appear in our national firearms databank. Since they are already illegally owned, it's unlikely their owners would hand them in if they were suddenly banned. (Or should I say, "banned more?") The only people harassed by a handgun ban would be sport shooters and collectors -- people who are already no threat to commit crimes. Drug dealers and gang members would ignore a ban as readily as they ignore existing laws on trafficking, extortion, robbery and murder. In 2006, Saskatchewan Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz obtained unpublished StatsCan tables showing that between 1997 and 2005, only 2.3% of homicides were committed with registered guns. The does not necessarily mean 97.7% of firearms murders in Canada are committed with unregistered guns. In some cases the registration status of the weapon could not be determined. Still, his numbers show how pointless a ban on guns would be; unless, of course, you were looking for a hollow symbol of your deep and abiding concern. |