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Debunking the myths driving the gun-control advocates
The current gun registration and fraud by the Liberal Government of Canada, that has
already run up a $1 billion dollar liability without having anything good to show, will
most likely cost Canadian tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars more before it will
be scrapped. Let's hope it never comes into full operation, because then it will
cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to be operated, regardless of how
inefficient and useless it threatens to be. However, not all is lost. If
nothing else, the government's scheme to create work and have the citizens pay for it
brilliantly illuminates a very important aspect of gun control. The increasingly
stricter rules regarding gun control will in the end harm nobody but the average citizen.The
links shown below will take you to a few articles that illustrate a few important points:
- Guns save lives and deter violent crimes;
- Contrary to popular wisdom, people defending themselves with a gun are 2.5 times more
likely not to be hurt than people who do not own guns with which to defend themselves;
- There are fewer violent crimes in jurisdictions where people may have and carry weapons;
- The gun control advocates who promote the false propaganda about guns are ideologists
who care not a whit about the truth;
- Generally, anywhere in the world where gun control was implemented, violent crime rose.
Where people were allowed to carry weapons, violent crime fell;
- In a society in which law-abiding citizens are prevented from owning and carrying guns,
the only people left in possession of guns will be criminals and the police, and the
citizens will be defenceless.
Those and more facts can be found in the stories at the links identified below, but
don't expect that to change the gun-control advocates' thinking, ideology and rhetoric.
The gun-control advocates got their minds firmly made up, no amount of truth will
confuse them.
From the dust cover:
Does allowing people to own or carry guns deter violent crime? Or does it
cause more citizens to harm each other? Wherever people happen to fall along the
ideological spectrum, their answers are all too often founded upon mere impressionistic
and anecdotal evidence. In this direct challenge to conventional wisdom, legal scholar
John Lott presents the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever done on crime. In
this timely and provocative work he comes to a startling conclusion: more guns mean less
crime.
- THE COLD, HARD FACTS ABOUT GUNS
By John R. Lott Jr., the John M. Olin law and economics fellow at the University of
Chicago School of Law and the author of "More Guns, Less Crime."
Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1998, NORTH SPORTS FINAL EDITION
2002 12 28The Canadian gun control fiasco
The photo shown below is of a highway bill board that is being sponsored by LUFA (Law-abiding Unregistered Firearms Association,
"25,000+ Members and over 5 million unlicenced supporters!") and is located on
Highway 16A West, near Edmonton. Tens of thousands of people see it every day, and
it is only the beginning of a billbaord campaign by LUFA.
 Ever since its inception, the scheme to disempower Canadians by forcing
them to register their firearms and thereby to raise enough money to have them finance
their own demise, many voices pointed out the inherent fallacies of such a hair-brained
undertaking. The Liberal goverment and its last three successive justice ministers,
Allan Rock, Anne McLellan and Martin Cauchon, could not be deterred. They found
ever-novel ways to create and fund a new, massive, billion-dollar bureaucracy and to pull
the wool over the eyes of voters and Parliament alike. The deal was presented as a
bargain that nobody could possibly resist at a price of a mere $2 million to set it up.
However, truth is stranger than fiction. Reality set in, and even
though our government insisted that the deal was still the best possible if only we would
continue to throw more money at it, on December 3, 2002 the Auditor General, Sheila
Fraser, opened many people's eyes by pulling back some of the wool that had covered them
and blew the whistle on one of the biggest scams ever pulled on the placid and
unsuspecting Canadian public as well as on a collaborative Parliament that usually and
customarily did nothing else but vote the way its leader told it to vote.
The January 6, 2003 issue of The Report Newsmagazine contains three
articles by Peter Stock that describe some of the details of the billion-dollar fiasco
reported by Sheila Fraser and more that must be read.
BOOK PREVIEW
WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Guns are good
'Right from the Heart' excerpt extols benefits of firearms
--WND
Fraser Institute email update, 2002 12 04
________________________
Massive Cost Overrun in the Gun Registry Completely Predictable
The ballooning $1
billion price tag of the Canadian gun registry was predictable to anyone who has followed
this massive boondoggle, says Gary Mauser, author of the study Misfire:
Firearm Registration in Canada, published last year by The Fraser Institute.
"It was clear to me in 1995 that this thing was a white elephant," says
Mauser, a highly-regarded academic from Simon Fraser University.
The federal government claimed in Parliament that it would cost no more than $85
million over 5 years to implement firearm registration. In 1995, Mauser predicted that the
final cost for the registry would be between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. In 2002, the
full cost of setting up the registration bureaucracy has already reached $1 billion.
"We don't know how much this fiasco will eventually cost but if it is allowed to
continue on the same path, the bill could easily reach $2 billion by 2005," he says.
The media release
The complete
report (PDF file)
Gun control myths:
Part I, November 26, 2002
Gun control myths:
Part II, November 27, 2002
Gun control myths:
Part III, November 28, 2002
....To the end of March this year, the registry had cost $688 million. By the end of
the current fiscal year, it will have consumed another $185 million, for a total of $873
million. Even if it manages to stay on budget (something it has never even come close to
doing in any given year), by the end of 2004, the registry will have devoured $1 billion.
....Progressive Conservative Leader Joe Clark insisted that Cauchon uncover who had
authorized "the deliberate withholding of information from Parliament," and fire
them.
That's going to be a VERY long list.
In 1997, the government was caught lying about the crime rate to justify the
need for the registry. Now it has been caught lying to Parliament and Canadians about the
cost of the registry, no doubt so as to maintain public confidence in this bureaucratic
disaster.
Who authorized the shady set of books? Who authorized the character
assassinations on those who dared raise concerns? Who authorized bringing in Statistics
Canada to claim that anyone who criticized the registry had their crime statistics wrong?
Who authorized the rubber-stamping of licences and registrations, just to make this scheme
look like a success, when the Canadian Firearms Centre proved itself incapable of doing
proper background checks within the time allotted?....(Full Story)
The sky was the limit, promise-wise, when the Liberals were trying to sell their gun
control scheme in 1994 and 1995.
No purported benefit was already too big that it couldn't be inflated even
more. No ludicrously unlikely side effect was too outrageous to be promoted as a sure
thing. Gun control was a Liberal shibboleth and the need to pass it made any tall tale
justifiable. (Not unlike the government's current "full-court press" on Kyoto.)
The two most famous distortions were the registry's estimated cost and the
number of violent crimes involving firearms. (Full
Story)
- Dead is dead, and safe is safe
Liberals' registry is targeting the least dangerous guns in the country
By Lorne Gunter, The Edmonton Journal, Sunday 10 February 2002
You'd never know it from reading my stuff, but I was once a
member of the University of Alberta's writing skills committee.
Among our tasks was reviewing freshman essays. One I'll never forget
advocated strict gun control, and contained the memorable non sequitur "Gun control
is needed more in the 20th Century than in previous centuries, because being killed with a
bullet is more fatal than being killed by a sword." (Full
Story)
Back to Index of Health Issues
 The White Rose
Thoughts are Free
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Posted 2002 11 28
Updates:
2002 12 04
2003 09 12 (added link to book preview
Right from the Heart)
2007 12 14 (reformated) |
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