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Feel-good bans don't reduce violent crime

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In advocating for a ban on handguns in his city, Toronto Mayor David Miller is breaking no new ground. National and municipal gun bans have been tried throughout the developed world and always with the same result: Gun crime remained the same or went up after the ban.

In other words, Mr. Miller will this week ask the executive committee of Toronto City Council to adopt measures to curb gun crime that have been tried over and over elsewhere only to have failed each time.

This seems a textbook example of the definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

In 1996, following the tragic mass murder at Port Arthur in Tasmania, in which 35 died, Australia's national and state governments agreed to a massive gun confiscation. Beginning in 1997, over 643,000 firearms were "bought back" by the national government and destroyed, at a cost of over half a billion Australian dollars.

The effect was almost immediate: Gun crime went up.

In the first two years after the buyback, armed robberies rose by 44%, assaults by 9% and murders 3%.

Crime rates have since stabilized, or even inched down. But as a new peer-reviewed study by Samara Mc-Phedran, a post-doctoral research fellow in the school of psychology at the University of Sydney and chair of the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting, points out, the 1996 ban had no net effect on gun crime. To the extent that crime and suicide rates have declined in the past 12 years in Australia, they have merely continued downward trends begun long before the ban. The cause is demographic -- as the average age of the population has increased, violent crime and suicide has decreased --not legislative.

Similarly, following the horrific 1996 Dunblane slayings at a Scottish elementary school, the British government banned all private ownership of handguns. The restrictions were so complete, the British Olympic shooting team was forced for a time to shuttle across the Channel to train in northern France.

The overall effect of the ban was the same as in Australia: Gun crime skyrocketed. Unlike in Australia -- where rates levelled off -- gun crime and other violent crimes have continued to soar in Britain. Last year alone, the increase was 4.3%.

In all, violent crime in Britain has increased by more than half in the past decade and the stockpile of handguns has increased by three million, almost all smuggled in via the black market.

According to a new study on the effectiveness of the handgun ban conducted by the Institute of Economic Analysis, "The ban's ineffectiveness was such that by the year 2000, violent crime had increased so much that England had the developed world's highest rate of violent crime, far surpassing even the U. S. A."

In the intervening years, the situation has only worsened.

Gun controllers like to claim this spike has been due to a sharp rise in non-gun violent crime -- stabbings, assaults, rapes and so on -- and, undeniably, part of it has been. (A sharp rise in the drug trade is most to blame.) This counterargument, though, is entirely immaterial to proposed bans, such as Mr. Miller's.

So what if some, or even much, of the rise in violent British crime involves no firearms? The advocates of gun bans, such as Mr. Miller, promise that confiscating the legal property of law-abiding sport shooters will make our streets safer, not merely cause criminals to take up other weapons.

There is no point banning guns if the thugs merely choose a knife or bat, instead. To the victim, the type of weapon is secondary. He or she wants the crime prevented, period. And bans don't reduce violent crime.

On Wednesday, former Liberal justice minister Alan Rock wrote in the Windsor Star that since his 1995 gun registry was implemented, "333 fewer Canadians die annually of gunshots." Homicides "with firearms are down. Suicides with firearms have dropped" and "domestic murders with firearms have plummeted."

All of which is true-- sort of--and entirely beside the point.

Fewer Canadians are murdered with firearms, commit suicide with firearms or murder their spouses using a gun. The trouble is, the overall rates for murder, suicide and domestic murder have not changed much. Criminals intent on committing murder or troubled people determined to take their own lives have simply switched to other weapons. They haven't stopped committing their acts, which is what politicians selling registries and bans always promise will happen.

Mr. Rock's registry, like the British and Australian bans, has done nothing to make streets and homes safer in absolute terms, even if they have managed to make both marginally safer from guns.

And Mayor Miller's ban, if he wins one, will be just as useless.

lgunter@shaw.ca