I have a question about gun crimes in Canada that should be available if anyone can tell me the answer. What percentage of gun crimes in Canada were carried out with a weapon registered in the long gun registry? I would assume that the majority were committed by criminals who did not register their weapons and that the registry itself does nothing to prevent these criminal acts. However if any significant proportion of gun crimes came from registered guns, then the registry can serve a useful purpose in law enforcement investigations. It may not prevent the crime from taking place, but if it can help catch and prosecute criminals, then the registry would have some value to our society.
I have never been a gun registry advocate, on either side of the debate, but given that Parliament will soon be voting on whether or not to scrap it; I would be curious to know what percentage of gun crimes happened with a registered gun? And what percentage of crimes solved were solved with information from the gun registry? If the answer to either or both of those questions is an insignificant number, then clearly the long gun registry is a waste of money and should be scrapped.
You might also want to include crimes committed with Hand Guns and if those guns were registered. It will give a more complete picture on crimes committed with registered weapons no matter what type of gun it is.
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ReplyDeleteThe crucial test is whether gun laws improve public safety. There is no social benefit in restricting the availability of guns if total murder and suicide rates remain unchanged. It is difficult to claim that public safety is letter if there is no decrease in the number of lives lost. The evidence, as I will show, indicates that all that is accomplished (at best) by the removal of one particular means is that people manage to kill themselves or others by some other means.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.garymauser.net/pdf/MauserPaper-200611.pdf
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36633614/En-Firearms-Evaluation-Report
ReplyDeletePage 94-95: for year 2007, from Statistics Canada, Juristat
• 594 homicides
• homicide victims at equal risk of being shot or stabbed
• 190 homicides by stabbings
• 188 homicides by shooting
• 116 killed by beating
• 50 by strangulation/suffocation
• 16 by motor vehicle.
Page 115, Homicide in Canada 2007, StasCan, Juristat:
• contrary to a general decline in homicides, gang-related homicides continued to increase
[do gang members license & register THEIR guns?]
• homicide victims are at equal risk of being either shot or stabbed
[should knives be registered]
• incidence of handguns used in homicides continues to rise, while use of rifles/shotguns continues to decline
[maybe because handguns are easier to hide before committing the crime? Does registration have anything to do with it?]
Page 98 of the report may have some of the answers you're seeking.
Then, starting from page 101 onwards, there's a breakdown of # of homicides in Canada & each province.
I gave it a cursory look, but did not see any statistics on # of crimes committed with a registered versus an unregistered long gun.
-- Gabby in QC
I would also like to know what percentage of crimes committed with a registered gun were by the actual owner vs. ones committed by weapons that were stolen from the owners.
ReplyDeleteWhere firearms were used in a violent crime, 71.2% involved handguns (but it is estimated that over 1/3 involve replicas or air guns), only 9% involved rifles or shotguns (of which 2.1% were registered) and 6.5% involved sawed off-rifles or shotguns (already prohibited).
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect your question doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether someone is killed with a registered firearm or an unregistered one. In fact I can go and buy the weapon Marc Lapine (actually his name was Mussaf or something) used tomorrow if I wanted one. All legal like. The registry we need is a firearms offender and prohibition registry. Trying to track and control objects will end up with what we have with the registry. A frickin mess with most firearms owners beleiving that it is simply a short cut to confiscation which has already happened with certain firearms by a stroke of a pen. El Al in Isreal checks people not objects. How many of their planes have been blown out of the sky in the past 20 years? With the registry focusing on high risk people we could stop the insanity of what is happening in Toronto with gang bangers getting arrested on gun charges, released with a prohibition order and no way to track them. They get another gun and kill or wound someone else and it all happens again. With a firearms prohibition registry police can track and check up on these people just as they can with pedophiles. You need to focus on the offender, not the object.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what % were registered for all types of crimes ( I read 40% somewhere but can't find it ) but for homicides it was 35%.
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an RCMP spokesman helpfully informed me that between 2003 and 2008, there were 152 homicides committed in Canada with long guns where the registration status of the weapon was known. Fully 35% of the long guns in question were, in fact, registered.
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/09/05/chris-selley-the-long-gun-registry-%E2%80%94-a-cautionary-tale
It's less than 5%. I believe it's actually 2.3% of gun crimes in Canada are committed with registered long-guns.
ReplyDelete" I believe it's actually 2.3% of gun crimes in Canada are committed with registered long-guns."
ReplyDeleteMost gun crimes are committed with hand guns. Most guns used in crimes are not recovered. Out of the murders committed with long guns that were "recovered", approx. 30% or more were registered. I don't have the stats for 2009, but in 2006, 190 murders were committed with firearms. 108 of them were with a handgun and the rest with a rifle or shotgun. Out of those, police recovered 48 guns. 18 of them were registered. You can't tell if a gun was registered or not if you don't recover it. And most of the time, they don't recover the gun that was used. This is just for murders, not all crime. The 2-3% figure comes from using all crimes with a gun ( both hand and long guns ) and then calculating only the "recovered registered" long guns from that list.
Most of the recovered registered guns used in crime were in domestic violence ( when someone went off the deep end ) or when a gun was stolen from the registered owner.
There are nearly 7 million registered long-guns in Canada. Yet of 2,441 homicides recorded in Canada since mandatory long-gun registration was introduced in 2003, fewer than 2 percent (47) were committed with rifles and shotguns known to have been registered. (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics).
ReplyDeleteSource: http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/media/nr/2007/nr20071116-2-eng.aspx
In 2007, 126 homicides were committed with a handgun, 16 more than in 2006. The rate of homicides committed with a handgun has more than doubled over the past 20 years. At the same time, the use of rifles/shotguns to commit homicide continues to decline.
ReplyDeleteHomicides committed with handguns are primarily an urban phenomenon. Within the nation's metropolitan areas, 81% of all firearm-related homicides were committed with a handgun in 2007, compared with 29% in the rest of Canada.
Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/081023/dq081023a-eng.htm
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Why is that proponents of the gun registry claim it helps save lives when homicides committed with handguns (already highly restricted / registered) continues to rise?
All a registry does is help identify a killer faster in SOME cases.
It seems to me that the problems aren't guns, but urban settings. The solution, therefore, is to require all urbanites to wear shock collars so that if they come within a km of a gun it kills them.
ReplyDelete