Column: Gun legislation a failure, let us count the ways

PUBLICATION: The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
DATE: 2004.05.17
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Sports
PAGE: C7
COLUMN: Outdoors
BYLINE: Lloyd Litwin
SOURCE: The StarPhoenix

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Gun legislation a failure, let us count the ways

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When you start a diet program, it doesn’t matter where you start from or what sociological factors prompted it. What matters is the gains or losses after you start. If the weight goes down you are on the right track. If there is no loss or the weight goes up, then you are doing the wrong thing. If you spend a lot of money for negative results the whole exercise should be scrapped and a different approach should be tried.

This sensible and simple analogy was presented by Dr. Gary Mauser at the recent seminar sponsored by the Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners’ Association. His research and publications showed some interesting trends.

If you listen to the anti-gunners, the mere presence of guns will increase the rates of homicides, suicides and violent crimes. So Canada and the United States should be the worst places to live. Admittedly, the U.S. has the highest incidence of gun crime. So it’s the fattest kid at the gym. But if we look at the last 10 years, the results from the U.S. contradict other countries’ attempts to solve the problem.

The rate of decline of gun-related crimes in the U.S. is better than Canada’s. It’s also much better than in Britain and Australia. Countries where they have banned and confiscated guns are seeing crime rates rise significantly. The U.S. diet is working; ours is not.

The anti-gunners like to point to suicide statistics as proof Bill C-68 in Canada is working. Indeed, gun suicides are going down, arguably due to the increased complexities and scrutiny in obtaining a gun. However, the total number of suicides is not changing. People bent on destroying themselves turn to other methods. So again the expensive experiment has failed to achieve one of its stated purposes.

The day at the seminar was filled with other speakers from Victoria to Halifax relating their own experiences and giving their explanations as to why the latest round of gun control is a waste of time, money and effort. But they were preaching to the converted. The audience was known supporters. The only skeptics were the three media reporters who came to question Dr. Mauser in the middle of the afternoon. Their questions would have had more relevance if they had bothered to sit in on his whole presentation.

A lawyer from Arizona made a good presentation that shocked us, then got our minds into a mode of re-evaluating our methods. First, he showed a video that documented the tragedies of the modern world; the extermination of more than 150 million people since 1900 by governments which started the process by outlawing the public from owning guns. Once disarmed the people were defenceless.

For me the most intriguing discussion was the message about using the proper language in our own defence. For example: Gun control is a physical description. It’s used when handling the gun. You control it at all times to be safe.

The political movement happening now is properly called people control. It should be criminal control, but the government has missed the target and set up all these rules to control the law-abiding citizen. When they get around to requiring criminals to register where they live and when they move, under penalty of law, then it will be criminal control, not gun control as it is mistakenly now called.

And finally a profound statement: The constitution was written to protect people from the government, not to protect the government from the people.