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Thursday, July 29, 2004
An ideologue's paradise
The crime rate has gone up. Murder rate is down. But robberies are up. Here is the CBC story on the matter: National crime rate jumps in 2003.
Since I have written on the firearms registry, I am more or less expected to keep up with these things like the national crime rate (I'm not a gun owner myself), so when I saw the link to the CBC story on Bourque I was inclined to click on it. I read through the thing expecting to find a word or two on firearms because, well, in case you haven't heard we have this hugely controversial long gun registry in this country that was, in the last federal election, stridently defended by MP and deputy prime minister Anne McLellan. The firearms registry is supposed to protect the public, and by that I take it that everyone expects that gun crime should be going down.
But in the CBC story I didn't find a word about firearms. That's odd. So I goes (btw that's a nod to my blue collar Canadian roots method of storytelling, "so I goes") to the Statscan Daily, on which the CBC story is entirely based (how much are we paying the CBC to edit and redraft government press releases?) and I find this 'graph about halfway down:
"The rate of robberies rose 5%, the first gain since 1996. This included a 10% increase in robberies committed with a firearm. Of the more than 28,000 robberies in 2003, 14% involved a firearm, 38% were committed with a weapon other than a firearm, and nearly half were committed without a weapon."
Well, at least Statscan didn't edit out that second sentence. Over on www.annemclellan.ca or at www.annemclellan.com I haven't found a press release yet screaming "Gun Robberies Increase; Liberals Take Credit"; nothing yet on the Liberal Party website, but it's still early. Mind you, I don't see the gun registry listed on the Highlights of Liberal accomplishments: 1993-2003. But then you might recall from a few days ago the Robert Fife article in the National Post about how the registry is being used as an example of bureaucratic bungling. Har har. McLellan--on whose watch most of the bungling occurred--gets re-elected and re-appointed, not defeated at the polls, not forced out of the cabinet as one would expect in a real country with real democratic accountability, not the democratic accountability our mouthful-of-BS prime minister has blabbed on about lo these many months.
Anyway, back to the crime stats. How reliable are these? I don't know. When crime rates go down, governments takes credit for effective policing, and when they go up, governments takes credit for effective policing, as in this story today out of central Britain. Nowadays, I always keep in mind these two paragraphs from an article written in the National Review Online in 2000 by an American optometrist:
"A headline in the London Daily Telegraph back on April 1, 1996, said it all: "Crime Figures a Sham, Say Police." The story noted that "pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to 'massage' statistics," and "the recorded crime level bore no resemblance to the actual amount of crime being committed."For example, where a series of homes was burgled, they were regularly recorded as one crime. If a burglar hit 15 or 20 flats, only one crime was added to the statistics."
With the introduction of strident gun control measures in Britain, that country appeared to experience an increase in robberies and property crimes. One might conclude, as gun rights advocates have, that the right to defend oneself and one's home is largely diminished with strict gun control and bans. Despite the British government's claims (mostly using something called the British Crime Survey) we see in this July 22 Telegraph article that in the nuts and bolts of it, crime there is on the increase. Here in Canada we have some proof of what appears to be the same trend.
So, now I refer back to Tuesday's Globe and Mail and an op-ed by Clayton Ruby; "Canada's gun control is on target."
"Strong gun control remains one of the core values that separate us from the United States. Despite the ludicrous claims that more guns result in less crime, most Canadians know that strong laws have set us on a safer path, very different from the one our neighbours to the south are walking."
No, we're walking the narrow path that Britain is on, our hands tied behind our back, staring at the ground; a way of walking that diminishes our responsibility and our freedom, a path where ordinary citizens are treated by default as criminals by the state, a path on which only the police and thieves have guns.
In my humble opinion, I think in the examples of Anne McLellan and Clayton Ruby we might learn that it is possible to be smart, memorize a lot of things, go on to become a lawyer, and even then--after all that--still remain an ideologue and a fool.
Posted by Kevin Steel on July 29, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
My first Firearms Acquisition Certificate would have been granted on the spot if the local RCMP detachment hadn't run out of the requisite forms. That's fine in rural Alberta: the corporal knew exactly who I was and that I had no criminal record.
Renewals through the city police in Lethbridge, Edmonton and Calgary proved to be no more difficult. I'd drop off the application form, pay and be told to pick up the new F.A.C. in two days. "We know you wouldn't apply if you had any chance of being turned down." How comforting, but then even Marc Lepine had a valid F.A.C.
The federal government could have accepted that most firearms owners wouldn't comply even with the minimal requirements for licensing at the time. They could have enacted adequate punishments for criminals who used firearms. They could have prohibited the provincial Attorneys General from issuing sentencing guidelines for judges that sterilise Parliament's intent - which makes the A.G. a party to the offence or at least an accessory after the fact in moral terms. Instead, we got an endless series of asinine restrictions on magazine capacities, a more intrusive licensing scheme and a hopelessly flawed registry.
"Strong laws"? Get real.
Posted by: Charles MacDonald | 2004-07-29 12:40:57 PM
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