No Gun, No Re-Election Issue

Fiberal Attorney General Michael Bryant is desperately looking for his one-line re-election issue. He thought he had it with "No Gun, No Funeral" which targets owners of legally registered firearms as some sort of miraculous solution for the wholesale slaughter presently centered in Toronto's northwest end.

Bruce Gold begs to differ.

In Canada in 2003, there were 548 homicides, 161 resulted from shooting (29.3%). There were 302,000 “crimes of violence” and 5% of these crimes “involved” a firearm. This “involved” category is misleading, guns “involved” in crime are guns picked up by the police from a crime scene - say ones that were found in a closet. Guns are actually used in violent crime about 1.9% of the time. no gun = no funeral” as a physical impossibility since 71% of homicides will not be affected

Statistics Canada has reported that 2.27% of homicides in Canada were committed with a registered gun and only 1.21% were committed with a registered firearm that was owned by the accused (Statistics Canada study of 5,194 homicides between 1997 & 2005).

A crackdown on the law abiding will accomplish what?

In 2003, there were 161 gun homicides in Canada. Assuming that each shooting involved a separate gun we can calculate what percentage of Canadian guns were involved in these murders. If we take the official figure of seven million guns we get (161/7,000,000 = 0.000023 or .0023%). Only 23 ten thousandths of 1% of the Canadian gun stock was involved in a homicide.

So what's the bottom line here, Bruce?

If we pursue our policy of regulating crime by strictly regulating gun availability to the general public we can reasonably expect that .0023% of our efforts will affect guns used in homicide and 99.997% of our effort will be wasted.

Perhaps Bryant should just rename his dog "Peace Moonbeam"... and hope for the best.

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RELATED: Profiling the product is stupid

Of course no one questioned that no actual criminals were caught. No one cared. Criminals weren't the problem. Guns were the problem.

If you could get rid of all the guns, there would be no criminals, and no crime violence. No gun, no criminal, no funeral.

Makes sense to some people.

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