From canada.com via Front Sight, Press:
“Sometimes I wonder whether Toronto Mayor David Miller actually listens to himself talk.
“Probably not.
“Nothing original ever issues forth from the man’s mouth. Instead, he seems only to function as a funnel for every fashionable theory about “root causes” and social engineering advanced in the past quarter century.
“Consider the drivel His Worship has produced since the murder last Wednesday of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, a high school situated in a violence-plagued north Toronto neighbourhood.
“Mayor Miller blamed Ottawa for letting law-abiding citizens own handguns.
“Apparently, the problem couldn’t be the prevalence of father-absent upbringings in the Jane-Finch area of Toronto, or the glorification of gangsta, drug and gun culture that liberals and social democrats such as Mr. Miller have been loathe to denounce out of a politically correct irrational [phobic] fear of being called racists.
“Nor could it be the every-boy-a-good-boy approach to juvenile crime, also favoured by the Millers of the world, that has eliminated nearly all punishment for young offenders in favour of touchy-feely counselling that hardened young criminals — such as those who would shoot down a student in the hallway of a high school — just scoff at.
“It couldn’t be the way courts have hamstrung police investigations or lefty city councils have pared back police budgets and reassigned beat patrol officers to traffic safety campaigns and police-minority relations teams.
“Nope. If we follow Mayor Miller’s logic, the only reason Jordan Manners is dead is the federal Conservatives’ unwillingness to ban handguns.
“Well, while, we’re at it, why don’t we get those nasty Tories to ban drugs, bank robberies and car thefts, too. And murder. Let’s get them to ban murder, because murder is bad. And rape. And if all it takes to prevent bad things from happening are federal bans on them, well let’s just ban lots of stuff because then all sorts of crime and personal pain will just magically go away.
“Oh, right: Ottawa has already banned drugs, murder and robbery. The may have banned rape, as well. And despite this bad things continue to happen. In spite of laws making it a crime to murder, deal drugs and hold up credit unions, criminals still do it. Why?
“It should be obvious to a six-year-old, then, that a handgun ban would never eliminate or even reduce handgun crime in Canada. Handgun murderers in this country typically use illegal weapons, anyway — so banning the weapons outright would essentially be redundant. Despite this, self-important liberal left windbags such as David Miller never fail to call for such bans every time a horrific crime presents them with an opportunity to do so.
“Their constituencies — academic theorists, special interest and right organizations, feminists, guilty white liberals and multiculturalists — disdain guns and lawful gun owners (not our kind, dear). So guns make an easy — and convenient — target. If they can turn the blame on guns and lawful gun owners, then they do not have to admit their own social and criminal justice experiments have been a bust.
“A 2004 metanalysis by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (hardly a gun-owners’ lobby) evaluated more than 250 articles from academic journals, nearly 100 books on gun control and more than 40 government studies from around the world. They found no evidence that gun control or gun bans had reduced gun crime, gun murders or suicides with guns. Curious, isn’t that? And this is the rule rather than the exception.
“A new study by American criminologist Don Kates and Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser (both, admittedly, pro-gun ownership), published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, shows no correlation between civil gun ownership and murder or suicide.
“For instance, Kates and Mauser found that Russia, with a relatively low incidence of legal gun ownership (4,000 per 100,000 population) has a murder rate nearly 30 times that of Norway, even though Norwegian civilians own nine times as many guns as Russian civilians.
“Since Britain implemented a near-complete ban on civilian handgun ownership a decade ago, handgun possession among criminals has soared by an estimated one million to three million guns, and handgun crime has almost tripled. What an amazing coincidence.
“The cause of gun crimes such as the Manners murder and Britain’s recent rash of similar shootings is a changing culture. And that’s the one “root cause” David Miller and his ilk refuse even to talk about.
“- Lorne Gunter “
