February 12, 2003

The Editor

The National Post

Dear Sir:

Re:  Keeping Violent Crime and Guns in Perspective

Your front-page story in the February 11^th edition of your paper, “Gun cut from spelling tests after pacifist parents protest,” quoted Mrs. Amanda Sousa: “The word gun is synonymous with death,” and “Guns are violent.  End of story.”  I spent 24 years in the classroom and I know we do our students a grave disservice if we mislead them as to what the root causes of violence are.

It would be good for Mrs. Sousa, the Lombardy Public School Board, and your readers to keep gun violence in perspective and by extension how ineffective registering firearms is as a policy to reduce the criminal use of firearms.

q       In July 1997, the Commissioner of the RCMP wrote the Deputy Minister of Justice to complain about the department’s misrepresentation of RCMP statistics: “Furthermore, the RCMP investigated 88,162 actual violent crimes during 1993, where only 73 of these offences, or 0.08%, involved the use of firearms.”   

q       In 1999, Statistics Canada reported that a gun was present in 4% of the 291,000 violent crimes committed that year and actually used in 1.4% of them. 

q       In 2000, Statistics Canada reported that of the 21,279 robberies committed that year, handguns were involved in 14% of them and long guns present in just 1%.

q       In 2000, Statistics Canada reported 799 robberies that resulted in major personal injuries to the victim.  Their injuries were as a result of: the use of physical force in 31% of the robberies; the use of a knife in 18% of the robberies; the use of a club in 18% of the robberies; the use of some other type of weapon in 24% of the robberies; the use of a handgun in 9% of the robberies and the use of a long-gun in none of the robberies.

q       In 2001, Statistics Canada reported 554 homicides in Canada: 53% were stabbed and beaten to death and 31% were shot to death.  Sixty-five percent of persons accused of homicide had a Canadian criminal record, and 58% of these had previously been convicted of violent crimes.

q       Despite 68 years of registering handguns, Statistics Canada’s homicide reports have shown a steady increase in firearms homicides committed with handguns from 27% in 1974 to 64% in 2001.  Between 1997 and 2001, 74% of the handguns recovered from the scenes of 143 homicides were not registered.  As Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino said recently, “A law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them.” 

In Canada’s Performance Report for 2002, Treasury Board reported that violent crime is 52% higher than the rate 20 years ago.  Statistics Canada reports show that the number of criminal incidents per police officer in the year 2000 had more than doubled since 1962.  Violent crime is the problem – not a paranoid preoccupation with the type of weapon used by the perpetrators in a very small percentage of the violent crimes.  More police on our streets and highways is the solution – not banning the word “gun” from our schools or a billion dollar long gun registry.

This whole discussion is a microcosm of the current fiasco surrounding the Liberal’s gun registration scheme.  As 68 years of registering handguns has proven, gun registration is not gun control.  Just think what we could have done with the billion dollars wasted on the gun registry if we had used it to target the root causes of violence in our society and providing a safe place for the victims of violence.

The Liberal attempt to control violent crime and improve public safety through a paper pushing gun registry is like the Lombardy Public School Board trying to give students the impression that if we remove the word “gun” from their speller it will reduce violence in our society. 

Sincerely,

Garry Breitkreuz, MP

Yorkton-Melville