We have generally avoided the hysteria-driven gun debate in both Canada and the US. It is another one of the hot-button topics that latte liberals pursue with a religious fervor similar to the doctrine of global warming. In this case, we reference a short post from Zero Hedge, Harvard Research Shows ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People’, that debunks much of the doctrine of this cause.
Citing a Harvard study by authors Don B. Kates and Mary Mauser, WOULD BANNING FIREARMS REDUCE MURDER AND SUICIDE? A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AND SOME DOMESTIC EVIDENCE, the study examines many of the precepts of the debate such as this passage and others quoted below with added emphasis.
International evidence and comparisons have long been offered as proof of the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths. Unfortunately, such discussions are all too often been afflicted by misconceptions and factual error and focus on comparisons that are unrepresentative. It may be useful to begin with a few examples. There is a compound assertion that (a) guns are uniquely available in the United States compared with other modern developed nations, which is why (b) the United States has by far the highest murder rate. Though these assertions have been endlessly repeated, statement (b) is, in fact, false and statement (a) is substantially so.
In particular, comparing the US and Britain:
Indeed, “data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England,” like data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”
In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban of all handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those owners law?abiding enough to turn them in to authorities. Without suggesting this caused violence, the ban’s ineffectiveness was such that by the year 2000 violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe’s highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States.
For Canadians Only
The Harvard authors, in their concluding paragraph, quote a study comparing crime in the US and Canada:
Over a decade ago, Professor Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated study comparing areas in the United States and Canada to determine whether Canada’s more restrictive policies had better contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was with the admonition:
“If you are surprised by [our] finding[s], so [are we]. [We] did not begin this research with any intent to “exonerate” handguns, but there it is—a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us where not to aim public health resources.”
An Anecdote for Hysterical School Authorities and Parents
We admit that we have fired but never owned guns. The first gun we ever fired was a World War I Lee-Enfield rifle converted to 22 caliber. We confess that we fired it in our high school. You see, our high school had a rifle range in the basement and an armoury where the rifles and live ammunition were stored. All boys as part of gym-class learned target practice. Talking with others of our peer group, we have found that our school, Chatham Collegiate Institute, was not unique in this respect.
Every graduate of that school went on to be a psychotic mass murderer. You couldn’t pick up a paper of the period – post World War II Canada – without several new cases of horrific slaughters in schools, malls, and public places. They might have been prevented if the positive correlation between guns and violent crime was known at the time.
For any reader confused at this point, the first paragraph in this section is completely true and the second to our knowledge, completely false. The slaughter in our society today is as much attributable to the socialistic decay of our society as it is to guns. And we suspect that it is substantially more so although political correctness may not allow the topic to be researched.
