DATE:
2004.09.20
EDITION:
National
SECTION:
Comment
PAGE:
A10
COLUMN:
George Jonas
BYLINE:
George Jonas
SOURCE:
National Post
BAN
THE KNIFE, BEWARE THE BENCH
Earlier
this month a paper published by the Fraser Institute landed on my desk. The
Failed Experiment is Professor Gary Mauser's look at the relationship between
firearms control and criminal violence. It brought to my mind an anecdote I
heard from my father.
In
the late 19th century, a young Viennese lawyer became county administrator in a
remote corner of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Being a reform-minded urban
intellectual, he was aghast to discover that in the local market-town Saturday
nights at the pub often ended in mayhem. The frisky lads of the district
couldn't resist stabbing each other with the knives they all carried in their
boot-tops.
The
new administrator decided to put an end to this barbaric practice.
"Here's
what you do," he told his sheriff. "Come Saturday, you and your deputy
go to the pub. As the lads come in at sundown, you tell them to take the knives
from their boot-tops and hand them to you. No ifs and buts. When they leave,
they can get their knives back."
The
constables obeyed, as did the local lads. A couple of months passed. The
progressive administrator had already put his mind to other matters, when the
sheriff knocked on his door again. "I was thinking, sir," he said to
the liberal reformer, "that perhaps we had better let the lads keep their
knives, after all."
"What
are you babbling about? I hear no one was stabbed at the pub for months."
"That's
just it, sir ," the sheriff replied. "The lads that got stabbed, they
mostly recovered. But the lads that get hit on the head with an oak bench, see
-- with respect, they don't stand a chance."
In
our days, Prof. Mauser plays the role of the sheriff, along with some
like-minded scholars, firearms experts, lawyers and criminologists. Last year, a
group of them held a symposium in London, England, and recently released a DVD
about it. Called A Question of Balance, the one-hour presentation reviews, in
Prof. Mauser's words, "the academic critique of the United Nations' efforts
to ban or tightly control firearms."
As
part of the London symposium, Prof. Mauser's paper examines "the failed
experiment" of gun control in Canada, Australia, England and Wales. Like
the sheriff in the anecdote, by looking at the overall consequences of a policy,
Prof. Mauser comes to the conclusion that gun control laws, far from reducing
criminal violence in a given society, tend to increase it.
"The
widely ignored key to evaluating firearm regulations," he writes, "is
to examine trends in total violent crime, not just firearms crime." This is
precisely the sheriff's point.
The
statistical evidence seems persuasive. On the whole, violent crime rates have
been falling and rising in inverse proportion to the extent and severity of gun
control laws. In America, where 35 states permit qualified citizens to carry
concealed handguns, violent crime rates have been dropping. In Britain, where
handguns are banned and confiscated, violent crime, including firearms crime,
continues to grow.
I
doubt, though, if the evidence offered by Prof. Mauser and his colleagues will
do much to influence public policy in the short run. At present, public policy
is in the thrall of the anti-gun lobby -- yes, there is an anti-gun lobby,
though there isn't much talk about it in the media -- and the anti-gun lobby is
guided by its own agendas and phobias, not by evidence.
Showing
that a person is less likely to become a victim of violent crime in, say,
Switzerland, where people of military age aren't only permitted but obliged to
have automatic assault rifles in their homes, than in, say, Britain, where no
person is permitted to own a handgun, won't cut much ice with either the
rational or the irrational opponents of firearms.
Irrational
opponents have a visceral aversion to guns. It may, perhaps, be modified by
hypnosis or psychotherapy but not by evidence or argument. Rational opponents
have no phobias as such, but they have a political agenda. They recoil from
seeing weapons -- symbols of individual sovereignty -- in the hands of private
citizens. It interferes with their ideal of power that, in their view, ought to
belong exclusively to the state. Perhaps such people have a phobia, after all: a
phobia to liberty.
The gun
lobby is usually described as "powerful" in the media, but in fact the
anti-gun lobby is far more powerful and pervasive in most Western societies.
Being urban and well-connected, culturally as well as economically, it has the
ear of administrators and legislators. A successful lobby well entrenched in the
corridors of power is unlikely to be swayed by the statistical evidence and
common sense arguments of Prof. Mauser and his colleagues. More's the pity.
Listening to the scholars and experts on A Question of Balance -- the DVD is
available from Snow Goose Productions, Mill Valley, Calif. -- could save
Canada's taxpayers a cool billion on our useless gun registry alone.