PUBLICATION:
The
Daily News (Halifax)
DATE:
2004.01.23
SECTION:
Perspective
PAGE:
16
BYLINE:
Moore, Charles
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As
gun ownership declines, home invasions increase
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We
won't know full details of what happened to John Wyllie until his accused
killers go to trial. But what we do know is that the Lawrencetown paramedic was
slain in his own home by intruders, and that's something that should never
happen to anyone.
Increasing
incidence of home invasion is emblematic of something else as well: the fact
that the government should be promoting gun ownership rather than spending more
than $1 billion harassing and discouraging gun owners. Why?
Because
it is a fact that as gun ownership declines, home invasions increase, like they
have here in Nova Scotia as our society is relentlessly subverted by an
ideological agenda that would have us discard the millennia-old principle of
self-defence of one's home and family, replacing it with essentially bovine
defenselessness. We now reap the consequences of this folly.
The
social-liberal authors of the gathering anarchy of our age have nothing to say
when confronted by robbers and killers who do it for no other reason than they
like doing it, have a good chance of getting away with it or will receive
relatively mild punishment if they don't.
Diminishing
effectiveness
The
rise in lawlessness has coincided with the diminishing punitive effectiveness of
our justice system.
Getting
back to my argument about guns, I don't know if Wyllie had a gun, or, if he did,
whether he would have had the opportunity or inclination to use it in self-defence.
The particulars of that tragic incident are not my point here, which is that
when a large proportion of homes in a community can be assumed to have guns,
home invasions are far less likely to occur, even in homes that don't have guns.
Criminals
fear armed homeowners, and non-gun owners benefit from an umbrella of protection
provided by their neighbours who own firearms. Simply put: the more guns, the
safer the community.
Within
five years of Great Britain introducing strict new gun-control legislation in
1988, the rate of legal, private gun-ownership declined by 22.4 per cent, while
violent crime rose by 33.6 per cent, robbery 80.6 per cent and robbery with a
gun 117 per cent.
Rates
of violent assault, sexual assault, armed robbery and home invasion in Canada
and the U.K. (which have relatively restrictive gun control) are higher than in
the United States, where the rate of legal gun ownership is high, and 38 states
allow the carrying of concealed weapons. A United Nations survey revealed that
England and Wales, with the strictest anti-gun legislation of any major country,
have the highest crime rate of the world's 20 most-developed nations.
The
U.S. anti-gun Brady Foundation argues that while about 29 per cent of adult
Americans own a firearm, and 18 per cent own a handgun, when someone is at home,
a gun is used for protection in fewer than two per cent of home invasion crimes.
The foundation is missing the point, which is that the high rate of U.S. gun
ownership almost certainly discourages home invasions in the first place.
Prefer
victims to be home
American
burglars usually make sure no victims are home. Canadian and British burglars,
however, prefer their victims be home, so wallets and purses can be stolen, too.
In the U.S., the percentage of household burglaries occurring when the home is
occupied has been surveyed at an admirably low 13 per cent. In Great Britain,
with a low rate of gun ownership, 59 per cent of burglaries occur when the
homeowner is home. In Canada, the rate was 44 per cent.
Switzerland
has a higher rate of gun-ownership than the U.S., and virtually no gun crime. A
landmark 1997 study by John Lott, a fellow in law and economics at the
University of Chicago Law School, determined that when permits to carry
concealed firearms are available to citizens in a county, murders fell by 7.65
per cent, rapes fell by 5.2 per cent, robberies fell by 2.2 per cent, and
aggravated assaults fell seven per cent.
A
home or business owner who defends his or her property and life against
predators by whatever force is necessary, including deadly force, should be
considered a hero by his or her neighbours and fellow citizens. Unfortunately,
in the morally perverse, through-the-looking-glass culture of social liberalism,
such a person is more likely to be punished instead. There's something very
wrong with this picture.