Simple math. 15-20 million guns in Canda, 7 million on registry.Hey, why not say SEVENTY HUNDRED TRILLION guns in Canada?
Man, not even Breitkreutz has that much gall. Made it up yourself, did you?
Heck, you could have asked the Law-Abiding Unregistered Firearms Association. (Yeah, read that one again. Puts me in mind of family trees on the net where I have found my 5xgreat grandfather in Nottinghamshire having a grandson born 250 years earlier in Virginia. Stop the merry-go-round and let me off.)
http://www.lufa.ca/quickfacts.asp Licencing and Registration Non-Compliance:
* 70% of licenced handgun owners have not registered their handguns.
(I don't even know how they'd begin to do that, unless they bought the things several decades ago. Or made their handguns in the bathtub.)
* 530,000 licenced gun owners have not registered their long guns.
Here's a thought. Maybe some of them aren't gun owners. You don't have to own a gun to have a licence. But somebody could always offer me the evidence here.
* Over 5+ million gun owners do not have a licence and have not registered any guns.
This may be my favourite. Canada has a population of 33 million. Let's say, very roughly, 20 million old enough to be eligible for a licence. It's generally accepted that about 1/4 of Canadian households have firearms. That means fewer than 1/4 of age-eligible Canadians have firearms, since the average number of adults per household isn't one. So LUFA wants us to believe that more firearms owners haven't either got a licence or registered their firearms than there are firearms owners. And yet --
* Over 70% of all guns in Canada are not registered - approximately 20+ million guns in total with approximately 7 million guns registered. Yet the government wants us to believe that there is a 90% compliance rate.
Okay, we're not even going to laugh at that 20 million noise. It's too sad. But we have 7 million registered firearms. Now granted, there are collectors with a couple of dozen or more of the things. But most owners aren't going to have more than a couple of hunting weapons or a couple of firearms for sports shooting. LUFA wants us to believe there are 20 million guns in Canada. That gives us a ratio of almost 2:3, guns to population -- not far off the US rate. And that be loonacy. Simple loonacy. You don't even need math for that.
My parents never owned guns. My siblings don't own guns. My co-vivant doesn't own a gun. His sibling and his sibling's partner don't own guns. His parents have never owned guns. No one I have ever lived with (and I once shared an old mansion with 18 other people) owned a gun. My uncles don't own guns. Now, I'll bet a couple of their kids own guns. One's a cop in Northern Ontario, I gather, and a bit of an asshole, so he probably does. One of my girl cousin's husbands was in the military, so I dunno, maybe he played with guns too. My oldest boy cousin probably does, because he lives in rural US. But then he doesn't count. Where I grew up, the guy next door owned a gun, and he used to get drunk and threaten people with it. None of the neighbours where I now life, some of I have known for 25 years, others less, owns a gun. My grandparents didn't own guns. None of the men I have been, uh, involved with, except one, owned a gun; add in all the others that didn't quite come up to the "involved with" point and I still couldn't think of a one who would conceivably have had a gun. The one who did have guns was a hunter, and I knew the people he hunted with, lawyers in a small town, and of course a bunch of people there owned guns for hunting, I just didn't know them. His teenaged son committed suicide with one of the guns. And of course that was in the 1970s. We know how hunting has declined in those 25 years. My best friend doesn't own a gun, her kids don't own guns, her exes don't own guns, the rest of my close circle of friends have never owned guns. Now mind you, one of my best friend's exes, and before she met him a dear friend of mine I should have nabbed when I had the chance, seems to be closely related to ... like, the brother of ... somebody currently on trial in a biker gang war multiple murder from a year or two ago ... but my friend's not a biker. And I did have that one friend with a registered handgun that I assume he once used for target shooting.
What it comes down to is: I have known and know a lot of people well enough to know whether they own guns. And of them, and closish family, I can name two who definitely had guns, and a couple more who may well own guns. Yup, most people of my acquaintance are urban. Just like 90% of the Canadian population. And I can tell you that the idea that 5 million people in Canada - over 1/4 of the adult population - own
unregistered firearms is a nonsense.
Oh, and there was that guy this week who wanted to buy my van. He lives outside the city, he hunts, he has a licence, his firearms are registered. (I had no reason to disbelieve him, but since our conversation made it clear that I know all about firearms laws and support them all and allow no firearms on my rental property, with which he wholeheartedly agreed, him telling me he had guns and then giving me his business card would have been kind of dumb if he were lying.)
Firearms ownership is most prevalent in the north and west.
The three northern territories have a combined total population of barely 100,000.
Saskatchewan and Manitobal combined, about 1.2 million.
Alberta, 3.5 million. But there, we're getting into a much more urban population.
Ditto BC: 4.4 million, but heavily urban.
You're barely topping *9 million* total population north and west of Ontario. Maybe every single eligible adult there has unregistered firearms. Or maybe only half of them, and the rest come from downtown Montreal.
There aren't that many assholes in Canada.
So anyhow, you seem to have taken the NFA/LUFA's number and figured it was maybe just a tad insane in the eyes of anybody who had a clue, and you'd offer a slightly lower range estimate too? Maybe you consulted that guy who cites Kopel as an "authority". Hahahaha! Or did you just draw numbers from a hat?
However the exact date isn't important.The exact date is actually extremely important in a context in which there is never-ending wringing of hands and rending of garments about how the Canadian Firearms Registry HASN'T DONE this and HASN'T DONE that -- when in fact the registry only
opened in 2003 and registration wasn't mandatory until some time after that, i.e. there was a grace period for complying.
When it is 2009 (or when it was 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 ... whenever gun militants have been wringing hands and rending garments about the inefficacy of the registry), it has been 5 years or less since any assessment of compliance could even beging to be evaluated. NOT 14 years, as citing the 1995 date is intended to suggest.
And I dunno. What was a firearms registry supposed to accomplish in 5 years? What do you think a firearms registry is supposed to accomplish?
You don't actually get to call something a failure unless you have proved that it has not done something it was supposed to do.
$1 billion, $2 billion it is just billions.Yes indeed. That $1 billion cost me about $33. Actually, given my tax rate, it could have cost me twice that. Good value for money, I say.
Y'know how people are always saying "if it prevents one death ..."? Ever worked out the costs of one firearm death, one firearm hospitalization, one firearm robbery? There's the funeral, just for starters. There's the lost productivity of the person who is dead, or off work. That's lost income to the person and/or the person's family. And of course the costs to the health care system of treating gunshot injuries. There are all of the police and criminal justice costs associated with investigating, charging, and prosecuting. Then there's the whole bill for the time the offender spends behind bars. (Statscan reports that in 2007, offences committed with a firearm netted sentences twice as long as the same offences without a firearm.) There are insurance costs -- compensation to victims of robberies, e.g.
Say, what did your government pay for those toilet seats?
I guess you've never heard of incompetence in government, and avarice in the private sector it contracts with.
How do you measure the value of the fact that in Canada it is IMPOSSIBLE to engage in straw purchases for trafficking by buying firearms "legally"?
You do know that this is a major function of the firearms registry, right? You buy six guns, a little flag pops up. Buy them all at once, or one a week, or, I would imagine, over the course of a year, and there will be that little flag, with your name on it. Most absolutely especially if you have managed to get yourself a restricted firearm licence so you can buy handguns, and that's what you're doing. You could always try to get some guy with a "collection" to make you a bulk sale off the books, but y'know what? It ain't gonna happen. You just aren't going to find noticeable numbers of legal owners of firearms selling their guns in supermarket parking lots. Or, hey, at gun shows!
It's kinda funny that with all of the weeping and wailing about ENFORCING THE LAW governing straw purchases in the US, straw purchases obviously being really quite a serious problem when it comes to bad guys getting guns, nobody ever wants to notice how there ARE NO straw purchases in Canada, and how that is BECAUSE OF the firearms registry, coupled with licensing. No. Straw. Purchases. (You'll allow me a teensy bit of room for hyperbole here. But since the person making the purchase would have to have a licence to start with, I'm just not seeing how I'd need much wiggle room.) Hell, if bad guys could get firearms by having their girlfriends buy them for them, do you think they'd be getting them smuggled in from the US?? (And no, cross-border trafficking does not compensate for lack of supply in Canada. Google may tell you what a hole a smuggled firearm will put in your wallet.)
Any comment?
Gun control hasn't reduced crime in Canada.Gun control hasn't made my tomatoes grow, either. Off with its head.
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