Globe Column: One thing’s for sure, crime causes gun laws
Date: Sep 18, 2006 10:04 AM
PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE: 2006.09.18
PAGE: A17
BYLINE: GARY MAUSER
SECTION: Comment
EDITION: Metro
WORD COUNT: 673

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One thing’s for sure, crime causes gun laws

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There are many ways to kill: bombs, knives, poison and guns, to name
just a few. How effective would it be to limit the availability of any
one of these tools if we want to reduce the incidence of murder? The
answer, quite simply, is that it would not be very effective at all.

As comforting as it might seem in the wake of last Wednesday’s shooting
spree in Montreal, proof is lacking that more restrictive gun laws will
make society safer. In fact, it’s time to ask if the money spent on
stringent gun laws might be better spent on other programs.

And make no mistake, gun laws impose very high costs on citizens, both
through compensation for confiscating outlawed weapons and by
stimulating the growth of government bureaucracy.

When Canada’s gun registry was introduced, it was claimed that it would
cost $2-million, but the Auditor-General found that the costs of only
part of the registry were more than $1-billion. And she did not examine
the entire sprawling program. Estimates of the total cost to taxpayers
now exceed $2-billion.

Yet, the firearms registry has not saved any lives. While gun homicide
numbers are indeed down, the total homicide rate has increased.

This suggests that crime rates are driven by sociological factors rather
than availability of just one method of murder.

In Canada, as in other countries, recent changes in firearms policy were
precipitated by a media frenzy over a multiple murder. In 1989, Marc
Lepine went to the University of Montreal, where he killed 14 women
before he finally shot himself. The Montreal coroner stated that the
type of weapon used was not a significant factor. Nevertheless, Canada
twice introduced sweeping changes to its firearms laws, in 1991 and
again in 1995. These changes included prohibiting over half of all
registered handguns, prohibiting a wide variety of semi-automatic
firearms, licensing gun owners and requiring the registration of rifles
and shotguns.

But to what effect? Since 1998, when firearms were required to be
registered, the homicide rate has increased by more than 3 per cent.
Despite the outrageous cost of the registry, the percentage of gun
homicides has remained fixed at 27 per cent. The percentage of family
homicides involving firearms has remained at 23 per cent.

Canada is not the only country that has introduced such gun laws.

Both the United Kingdom and Australia brought in stringent firearms laws
following garish media coverage of shootings in the 1990s.

But despite the effort, police statistics show that the U.K. is enduring
a serious crime wave. In contrast to the U.S., where the homicide rate
has been falling for more 20 years, the homicide rate in the U.K. has
been growing.

Nor did the introduction of stringent gun regulations in Australia make
the streets any safer. The country’s homicide rate remained basically
flat from 1995 through to 2001. And the destruction of the confiscated
firearms cost Australian taxpayers the equivalent of $420-million
Canadian, with no visible impact on violent crime.

(The costs of the confiscation do not include the costs of bureaucracy,
which, as has been shown in Canada, can be considerable.) Would a more
thorough firearms ban have been more effective? In the 1970s, both the
Republic of Ireland and Jamaica passed legislation to prohibit virtually
all firearms. In neither country has the attempt to ban and confiscate
firearms reduced the homicide rate.

So shouldn’t that $2-billion-and-counting be better spent on things that
might actually improve public safety? For example, the country’s police
budget has been effectively frozen since the 1990s. At the same time,
public policy changes have left too many mentally ill people and violent
criminals on Canadian streets. Perhaps we would have been better off had
the money wasted on the gun registry been invested in better treatment
of the mentally ill or longer prison terms for violent offenders.

It is an illusion that further tinkering with our gun laws will protect
the public, and it’s about time we realized this and spent our resources
more wisely.

Gary Mauser is a professor in the Institute for Canadian Urban Research
Studies, Faculty of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University.