Gun politics in Canada
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Gun politics in Canada are controversial, though less contentious than gun politics in the United States. The history of gun control in Canada dates from the early days of Confederation, when Justices of the Peace could impose penalties for carrying a handgun without reasonable cause.["Canadian Firearms Program Implementation Evaluation"] Department of Justice Canada. April, 2003. Accessed June 3, 2006. Criminal Code of Canada amendments between the 1890s and the 1970s gradually increased the controls on firearms, while in the late 1970s and 1990s significant increases in controls occurred. A recent study showed that Canada was in the mid-range of firearm ownership when compared with eight other western nations. Nearly 22% of Canadian households had at least one firearm.In a study of gun ownership in selected western nations, Canada's level of gun ownership (21.8%) was similar to France's (23.8%) and Sweden's (16.6%). Of the eight countries compared, firearm ownership was highest in the United States (48.6%) and lowest in the Netherlands (2%).["Firearms in Canada and Eight Other Western Countries: Selected Findings of the 1996 International Crime (Victim) Survey"] Canada Firearms Centre. Accessed: 2006-06-24.
History of gun politics in Canada
- The Criminal Code of Canada enacted in 1892, required individuals to have a permit to carry a pistol unless the owner had cause to fear assault or injury. It was an offence to sell a pistol to anyone under 16. Vendors who sold handguns had to keep records, including purchaser's name, the date of sale and a description of the gun.
- In the 1920s, permits became necessary for all firearms newly acquired by foreigners.
- Legislation in 1934 required the registration of handguns with records identifying the owner, the owner's address and the firearm. Registration certificates were issued and records kept by the Commissioner of the RCMP or by other police forces designated by provincial Attorneys General.
- In 1947, the offence of “constructive murder” was added to the Criminal Code for offences resulting in death, when the offender carried a firearm. This offence was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in a 1987 case called R. v. Vaillancourt
- Automatic weapons were added to the category of firearms that had to be registered in 1951. The registry system was centralized under the Commissioner of the RCMP.
- The categories of “firearm,” “restricted weapon” and “prohibited weapon” were created in 1968-69. Police were given preventive powers of search and seizure by judicial warrant if they had grounds to believe that weapons that belonged to an individual endangered the safety of society.
- Legislative provisions between 1977 and 1979 required Firearms Acquisition Certificates for all weapons and provided controls on the selling of ammunition. Fully automatic weapons were prohibited. Applicants for Firearms Acquisition Certificates were required to take a safety course.
- Between 1991 and 1994, legislation tightened up restrictions and established controls on military, paramilitary and high-firepower weapons.
- In 1995, new, stricter, gun control legislation was passed. The current legislation provides harsher penalties for crimes involving firearm use, licenses to possess and acquire firearms, and registration of all firearms, including shotguns and rifles. .["History of Firearms Control in Canada: Up to and Including the Firearms Act"] Canadian Firearms Centre. Accessed: June 3, 2006.
- As of 2006, while legislation is still in place, the government is no longer asking long gun owners for a registration fee and will not prosecute long gun owners who do not register at all.["Tories give long guns a break."] Globe and Mail, May 17, 2006
The pressure that led to the current law began with the École Polytechnique Massacre in Montreal on December 6, 1989. The legislation was written primarily to avoid situations such as the Oka Crisis rather than irrational behaviour. Notice that the firearm used in the École Polytechnique Massacre (A Ruger Mini-14) is still non-restricted, yet all firearms used by the natives at Oka are now prohibited. The present law requires all firearms to be registered. The cost of the registry has soared to well over 500 times its original two million dollar budget. This proved embarrassing for the Liberal Government and has led to increased calls for the registry's cancellation. The registry was originally intended to recover its costs through registration fees, however the Ministry later decided to waive the fees in an effort to increase compliance rates. This decision has contributed to the huge increase in the registry's cost.
It has been estimated that as many as 5,000,000 gun-owning Canadians have not registered their firearms. As of June, 2003 only 6.4 million firearms had been registered, despite a 1974 estimate of 10 million guns in Canada. Currently all provinces and territories, with the exception of Quebec, oppose the registry and refuse to prosecute violators. Supporters of the firearms registry argue that it makes no sense to abandon the project midstream, while opponents claim that the massive error rate and the non-compliance of existing firearm owners indicates there is little hope of future success. In February, 2003 the government announced plans to strengthen the administration of the gun control program. Two days before the election in May, 2004 the government dropped all fees for transferring firearms. The gun control program continues to be supported at an estimated cost of $100 million per year.
Violent crime in Canada
Canada did not have serious gun control until the late 1970s. The homicide rate in Canada has been stable or declining since (e.g., the homicide rate has declined 40% from 1991-2004) while several other categories of crime, such as violent crime, increased until the 1990s and then began to decline. It is clear that the rates of violent crime involving firearms are significantly lower than the U.S. In the year 2000, for example, Statistics Canada reported that homicides in the U.S. were triple those in Canada:
In 2000, police in the United States reported 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 population—triple the Canadian rate of 1.8. The number of homicides has declined in both countries during the 1990s, particularly south of the border. Two decades ago, the American homicide rate was about four times that of Canada.About two-thirds of homicides in the United States involved a firearm, compared with one-third in Canada.[link]
In comparing violent crimes between the two countries, some incorrectly compare the "Selected Violent Crime" numbers from the Canadian and United States governments (in the US the [FBI Uniform Crime Reports], in Canada the Statistics Canada [Center for Justice Statstics]) directly. However, this is misleading. As explained by Statistics Canada:
Despite a tendency to simply compare Canada's violent crime rate with the FBI's violent crime index, this type of comparison is inappropriate. First and foremost, Canada's violent crime rate contains a greater number of violent offences, including homicide, attempted murder, assault (3 levels), sexual assault (3 levels), robbery, other sexual offences, and abductions. The FBI only includes four main offences in the violent crime index: homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The FBI's exclusion of simple assault, which is the leading contributor to Canada's violent crime rate, makes this comparison impossible.[link]
Recently, some US authors, such as John Lott [link] and Alan Gottlieb [link], and Canadian authors such as David Frum [link] have made precisely this mistake in comparing these numbers directly without re-tabulating them in the context of discussing guns and violent crime in the two countries. Criminologists tend to avoid such errors by directly comparing rates between countries for each [index crime].
Historians point out that Canada's lower firearm related offences may not be related to Canada's current gun control laws, as Canada's murder rate was lower than that of the United States for many years, when gun control measures were similar and in some cases less stringent.{{fact]] Likewise, the murder rate in the US is skewed badly by the murders in those urban areas where gun ownership is effectively banned, such as Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago, IL.{{fact]]
Complex political situation
Matters of gun politics are further complicated by factors such as different police bodies and the role of provincial jurisdictions in gun law applications. Long before the present federal laws were enacted the two biggest provinces, Ontario and Quebec (with more than half of the Canadian population between them) had very strict provincial firearm registration systems. Again unlike the other provinces, Ontario and Quebec have separate provincial police forces (much like the larger state police forces in the US) while all other provinces have the federally-controlled Royal Canadian Mounted Police doing all police work outside the big cities. Thus, groups who might have normally opposed (or favoured) gun control in other circumstances find themselves in the other camp because of their desire to uphold provincial rights (or the identity of Quebec society) against federal centralization or vice versa. Thus, some provincial groups who might have opposed gun control because of the nature of their normal philosophical stance, had they been located in the US, are often in a political situation where they are asking for even stricter controls than those called for by the federal government, with the provision of course that application of these controls be left in provincial hands. It has to be recognized, however, that gun politics is not the flagship issue for the political right in Canada that it is in the US. In Canada, it is more of a rural versus urban issue. But this may be because the U.S. has a much larger rural population than Canada as a percentage of the total population.Notes and references
See also
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