Guns: Are tougher laws and sweeping restrictions the way to a safer society?

Guns have been a point of great contention for over a century in Canada and the US, increasingly so as of late. Starting in the early beginnings of confederation, Canada has created, altered, and removed restrictions on gun ownership. In the last 20 years lobbyists and the Canadian government have become increasingly tough on the citizens in regards to gun ownership in an effort to keep us all ‘safe’….but are they? Those who take the pro gun stance would argue that guns are a necessity for all people, while many governing bodies and lobby groups seem to differ. Who then, is correct?

There are two questions that need to be answered in order for one to come to a conclusion on whether guns should be available to the general public:

1. Do readily available guns (including that used by the army) make society more dangerous for law-abiding citizens?

2. Is it REALLY necessary for people like you and I to be able to own military-grade weaponry?

There are many anti-gun activists/groups that tirelessly point out that in countries who have minimal gun restrictions also have far more deaths overall, such as Canada’s ‘Coalition for Gun Control’. Their first ‘fact’ on their Myths and Facts page is as follows:

“People with guns kill more efficiently. Where there are more guns there are more deaths.”

After reading this I immediately looked for some sort of annotation; a link, anything connecting this alleged fact to the evidence from which it was extracted (…this is standard APA format taught in 9th grade English classes in Ontario…) since COUNTLESS mainstream/corporate media outlets have been throwing this statement out there. I couldn’t find any on their site, for nearly all of their ‘facts’ that they have written (this would garner a failing grade in any English/essay writing course) but I digress… I decided to collect some evidence for myself. I will take a look at Europe for starters, then focus on the west.

Piers Morgan, a former tabloid editor who was fired for fake war crime pictures in the UK as well as being forced to testify about his involvement in the recent phone hacking scandal, has been very vocal as of late regarding gun laws in the US on his CNN show (how he was able to get a job there with a reputation like his is a mystery to me). He has repeatedly stated that the UK has far fewer murders than the states and has been attributing this to the very strict gun control in place there. If we look at other European countries though, specifically Switzerland, we can clearly see that there is absolutely no validity in this argument. While the UK has very strict gun control, the Swiss are the polar opposite, having some two million guns in private hands in a population of eight million. Their men are enlisted into a militia at age 20 and remain a part of it in a reserve capacity until the age of 30. At this time, they can choose whether they wish to keep their militia weaponry or give it back to the government. The UK on the other hand, is mostly disarmed, even the police rarely carry firearms with the exception of Northern Ireland, and yet their crime rates tower over that of the Swiss (ranked 166 in a list of murders per country). Clearly the correlation between guns and violence/death does not hold true in any way here.

Next let’s look at the UK compared to the United States. In this article written by Richard Carey, a chart has been made that compares the murder rates of a small number of the 50 states to England/Wales as well as Scotland (more complete stats are located in links further down the page I linked to).  The information in the chart shows that Hawaii, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island have lower murder rates than England for a total of 4. When it comes to Scotland, there are a total of 10 states that have lower murder rates. If we If we look at the gun regulations of the 4 states that have lower homicides than England/Wales, we can see that their restrictions are very lax compared to those imposed on the people of the U.K. Additionally, data collected by the World Health Organization ranks U.K. ABOVE the US in murders overall. This means that statistically, a country full of guns has fewer murders than one with an essentially disarmed population. This certainly does not correlate with the CGC (Coalition for Gun Control) ‘Fact’ that more guns = more deaths. This article also makes a solid point when it comes to Morgan and his stance on American gun control, and this is one of many articles from a UK media outlet stating the fact that Britain is more violent than Africa or the U.S.

So what about Canada? As mentioned earlier, there has been a battle over gun rights for a long time in this country. A brief itinerary of Canadian gun law since 1892 can be found here. Laws have become increasingly tougher, starting with simple permits for pistols in 1892 to limiting magazine sizes later on, as well as registration, licensing, and putting restrictions on weapons classified as military grade.

So has all of this made Canada a safer place? This article by the CBC doesn’t seem to support such an argument, stating that although firearm deaths are at their lowest level in almost 50 years, killers are beginning to favor ‘the blade’. Federal agency Stats Canada says that the “increase in stabbings accounted for virtually the entire increase in homicides in 2011”, again disproving the guns = deaths argument.

One of the most compelling pieces of information I happened upon was produced in Hamilton, Ontario. It is a peer-reviewed article created by Caillin Langman of McMaster University. The article can be found in the ‘Journal of Intrapersonal Violence’ and is titled ‘Canadian Firearms Legislation and Effects on Homicide 1974 to 2008.’ This document provides research gathered from the Statistics Canada Juristat Database, and Langmann uses a number of different statistical analyses in order to reach the conclusion that there is NO connection between ‘legislation and firearm homicide rates between 1974 and 2008’. It was found that there was a connection in gun homicide and the median age of the population, meaning that murders have shrunk in the last 30 years possibly due to the aging baby boomers. The study also found that socioeconomic factors such as percentage of population attributed to immigrants, the unemployment rate, the percentage of population in low-income bracket, and the Gini index of income equality are important factors connected to violence/murder rates.

Everything above points to the same answer to question 1: readily available guns (including makes/models used by the army) DO NOT make society more dangerous for law abiding citizens. There are NUMEROUS societies that have millions upon millions of guns in circulation (Switzerland)that are less violent than countries with very strong gun laws and restrictions United Kingdom). When you examine the statistics of violent crime and murder you find that it is not connected to the number of guns in circulation, rather there is a deeper problem with the people in the society itself committing those crimes.

Trying to take guns away to fix murder rates and violent crimes has failed in the past, is failing presently and WILL fail in the future. All that it will succeed in is allowing criminals who acquire their weapons illegally to thrive (e.g. Mexico) as well as making it more difficult for people to defend themselves. This brings to mind an incident that started in Port Colborne, Ontario, that led to a 2.5 year legal battle involving firearms.

In this case, Ian Thompson awoke to four men throwing molotov cocktails at his home. He then quickly grabbed his gun from a safe and shot three warning shots into the air causing the men to flee. When the police arrived, he was taken into custody and all of his firearms/munitions were impounded. The crown attorney then attempted to charge Thompson with careless use of a firearm for defending his life and home. The prosecutors were later forced to drop the charge, and instead attempted to charge him with two counts of unsafe storage. Both of these charges were also eventually defeated in court. After reading the article and some of the court documents it is clear that the prosecutors wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money trying to punish a man defending his home from dangerous people. In this case the man used the gun as a tool to save his very life, and he didn’t even shoot at the men that could have killed him!

But what about question two regarding military weaponry? It is true that these weapons have but one purpose and that is to destroy whatever they fire upon with fewest bullets as possible, very different from average long rifles or shotguns. They are both formidable and fearsome. Why would anyone need these? It is at this point in the US that many people begin to speak about the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, but many don’t know what it is or why it is so relevant. Here is the text of the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The founders of the United states, the ones who created the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, wanted the people of the US to be armed to keep the country free (it has absolutely nothing to do with hunting). These men had seen multiple atrocities happen in other countries, and knew that an armed public was the best way to keep would be genocidal dictators from committing their horrendous crimes.

Edmund Burke was quoted as saying that “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”, and I think that this statement resonates strongly with the subject of population disarmament. If we look at some dictators throughout history (oftentimes men who were directly responsible for killing tens of millions of their own people through democide) we can see that they all had very strong opinions about guns, and that they did what they could to ensure that those they saw as enemies were disarmed so they could not resist their control. Below I’ll go through a few examples:

Adolf Hitler, Germany

‘The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police.’

Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944

This is by far the most famous example of a murderous leader worldwide. Everyone has heard of Hitler’s terrible legacy and the millions of people that he killed during the Holocaust (low estimates sit at around 6 million, while more broad numbers reach above 20 million) whether you see it daily on the history channel, hear about it at Remembrance Day or learn about it in history class. Many pro-gun voices use Hitler’s Germany as an example of gun confiscation and its deadly effects, but there are also many anti-gun arguments making the claim that Hitler gave more gun freedom to Germany rather than taking it away, therefore defeating that part of the pro-gun argument. The Mother Jones article written by Gavin Aronsen says so, stating that Hitler’s confiscation of guns is ‘superficially true at best’. He goes on to say that as World War I came to a close, the Weimar Republic imposed strong gun confiscation laws on the people of Germany as a whole in order to comply with the Treaty of Versailles, which Hitler loosened greatly over the time of his reign. The sum of his paragraph is as follows:

‘So did Hitler and the Nazis really take away Germans’ guns, making the Holocaust unavoidable? This argument is superficially true at best, as University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explained in a 2004 paper (PDF) on Nazi Germany’s impact on the American culture wars. As World War I drew to a close, the new Weimar Republic government banned nearly all private gun ownership to comply with the Treaty of Versailles and mandated that all guns and ammunition “be surrendered immediately.” The law was loosened in 1928, and gun permits were granted to citizens “of undoubted reliability” (in the law’s words) but not “persons who are itinerant like Gypsies.” In 1938, under Nazi rule, gun laws became significantly more relaxed. Rifle and shotgun possession were deregulated, and gun access for hunters, Nazi Party members, and government officials was expanded. The legal age to own a gun was lowered. Jews, however, were prohibited from owning firearms and other dangerous weapons.

The information regarding Weimar Republic/Nazi gun law stated above is easily accessible online and is known as the 1938 German Weapons Act. After reading the paragraph above, it is clear that Aronsen has forgotten who the target of the holocaust was, and hasn’t realized that he has defeated his own argument. He argues that the German Weapons Act gave guns back to the German people, which it really only did to those ‘of undoubted reliability’ such as hunters, Nazi Party members, and government officials ( this so called ‘reliability’ was decided by the Hitler Dictatorship of course) but more importantly it took guns away from the Jewish, the ones being persecuted, rounded up, and slaughtered. It disarmed the people the government wanted to target, making it easy for them to be controlled and killed. Hitler DID disarm people of Germany, and killed millions after he had done so.

 

Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung)

‘Every communist must grasp the truth:Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’

Quotations from Chaiman Mao Tse-Tung Ch 5 (pg. 72)

Mao isn’t nearly as popular as Hitler in western society, possibly because Chinese history and statistics have been very hard to collect due to the secrecy of the Chinese government. During his reign he was much more deadly having killed 45 million people in 4 years during the famine caused by his ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign. During his time in power, Mao maintained his control over the people of China via his ‘Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries’, utilizing registration and more broadly laogai reform through labor camps (re-education camps) against anyone thought to be a political dissident to keep them disarmed and defenseless. The famine was used to keep the poor people from rising up, and the registration/prison camps were used to control those who were strong enough and wealthy enough to speak out, taking away their freedom and confiscating their belongings so that they couldn’t resist the government in any way. I also found an interesting picture that gives viewers an example of the humiliation Chinese people suffered if they were seen as enemies of the government.

Joseph Stalin

“If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.”

 

Stalin was a pretty intimidating leader. By the end of his rule, it is estimated that Stalin was responsible for around 20 million deaths due to democide. Much like Mao, Stalin created the Gulags (a Russian abbreviation for ‘Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps’) essentially disarming any opposition, as well assassinating many government workers who opposed him before and during his dictatorship. He even went so far as to have people who had fallen out of favor with him edited out of pictures and documentation, essentially erasing their connections to him. The people edited from the images were usually dissenters who were executed. Stalin was also the undisputed cause of the Holomodor, a famine which resulted in the death of millions in the Ukraine.

This quote from Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, really sums up the above information very well:

   “The simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks’ homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went”). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.”All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets a piece, as the Militia Act required here.”

If you take time to look at statistical analysis as well as some history, it doesn’t take long to see that removing guns from society is not only an ineffective way to deal with violent crime and murder, but invites violence, murder and political corruption to our very doorstep. All corrupt leaders take arms away from their people so that they can continue doing whatever they wish politically without fear of being held accountable. I hope that after reading this, all of you out there will continue to pass this message on as well as continuing to do more research for yourself so that you can educate others about this very serious situation we are in the middle of. People’s faith in government is at all time lows because the common man and woman are not fools; we know that those in the government are serving their own best interests, and not the interests of the people. They have failed as servants of the public, and the sooner citizens become educated about their world the sooner we can make positive change for ourselves and for future generations so that they do not have to suffer from the continued degradation of society that we have been forced into. There is still hope for all Canadians to fight for the ability to own arms so that we can defend ourselves from criminals and government, and make things better and safer for the future generations of our beautiful country.

Thanks for reading as always. Please spread this article around to people you know and start to educate them on why guns are an essential tool for personal safety and in the fight against corrupt governments. In closing, I’ll post a few examples of people using guns to protect against the bad guys, so that readers can see cases which guns have played a crucial and positive role.

 

71yr Old Man Pulls Gun and Defends Innocent Patrons (Video)

Armed Homeowner Shoots Robbers During Daytime Invasion (AZ)(Video)

Woman hiding with kids shoots intruder