PUBLICATION:        The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

DATE:                         2004.01.23

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  Forum

PAGE:                         A13

BYLINE:                     Randy Schmidt

SOURCE:                   Special to The StarPhoenix

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Anti-gun lobbyists fail to link social ills to crime

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The following is the personal viewpoint of the writer, a resident of Saskatoon.

All governments have limited resources with which to improve society. In Canada, we need firearms policy based on reality instead of wishful thinking.

Those who favour building a better world through more restrictive gun control, such as Tim Quigley (Facts show new firearms program worthwhile SP, Jan. 8), present as reality that "the gap between the murder rates in Canada and the U.S. is one of the strongest cases for the effectiveness of gun control." Not really. Canadian and American murder rates diverged long before Ottawa became enamoured of centralized gun-control.

Yes, since Confederation we have had brief periods of gun control, generally ignored and usually directed at ethnic minorities (Irish, Japanese, other immigrants) or threats to the status quo (Metis, communists). Similarly, in the U.S., early gun control programs were primarily directed at blacks.

In practice, Canada remained a safer place relative to the U.S. even though most Canadian homes had a gun and Sears sold them through a catalogue.

The U.S. was founded on revolution, a partially slave-based economy and the subsequent brutality of a civil war. It continues to pay the price, with urban slums afflicted by family breakdown and a violent drug culture.

For the past 200 years, the murder rate in New York has remained at five times the rate of London. Britain has recently implemented tough gun control even as New York deals more effectively with crime and now their murder rates are starting to converge.

The Coalition for Gun Control likes to berate us by pointing out: "Provinces such as Saskatchewan, with higher rates of gun ownership, have higher rates of gun death." Yet, as Saskatoon and Regina compete for the title of Canada's most-violent city (based on population), the source of this sad statistic is actually our higher proportion of young aboriginals suffering from family breakdown, alcohol and FAS.

If we want to feel more secure, the murder rates suggest that we should consider living in ... North Dakota.

We will go backward if we cannot openly discuss and deal with causal factors of social breakdown instead of taking the politically correct and easy way out by blaming inanimate objects as if they were inherently evil.

As for determining the future crime patterns in Saskatoon, our boards of education, among others are going to have much greater impact than feel-good law-making.

Gun control lobbyists frequently quote old studies from the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and the New England Journal of Medicine, or claim the expert support of groups such as the Canadian Pediatric Society. This approach contains a conceptual flaw.

The mindset of these organizations is based on experience in improving public health through the "disease control model." Therefore, they believe, you should treat guns similarly to infectious agents; eliminate the agent and the disease of homicide will go away, at least in theory.

You can appreciate why firearm owners are getting a bit defensive. The disease control model is a path to misdirected spending and failure, because the cause of the violence often is failings in the human condition.

It looks as if the CDC has now realized this. It recently released an independent task force report that reviewed 51 published studies about the effectiveness of eight types of gun-control. The conclusion: "insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness."

To improve public safety, the most promising source of expertise are criminologists, the best of whom regard tactics such as gun registration as irrelevant. Indeed, you don't need a university degree to conclude that criminals pay little attention to such laws anyway.

Criminologists attribute much of the recent decrease in Canadian violence rates to a decline in the demographic cohort of young males. Improvements in trauma medicine are also reducing homicide rates.

A common tactic for those promoting increased restrictions on law-abiding firearm owners is to first establish intellectual or moral superiority. Quigley suggests that columnist Barry Cooper's reasoning in Firearms centre again under fire (SP, Dec. 9) "defies reason", "is folly" and is "irrational." Quigley then twists information on the effectiveness of concealed carry laws as being a "preposterous" statement that more guns will make us safer.

Our world is not such a simple one. Many people would have originally regarded proposals to increase driver safety by building roads with higher speed limits as "preposterous." We now know and appreciate these divided highways.

We can do better. What is required is to certify typical firearm owners as trained, stable and non-violent. Then stop the demonizing. Leave them alone and instead spend our money and energy doing something useful in areas such as policing, mental health services and pre-natal care to reduce violence.