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« Genie Scott Wins Major Award!!! | Main | How effective is the flu shot? »
Guns in Canada
Category: Gun Ownership
Posted on: October 8, 2009 3:32 PM, by Greg Laden
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TrackBack URL for this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/121825
Comments
Some reviewer somewhere misunderstood that part of the film to say that Canada has more guns per capita than the US, which is certainly not true. I don't numbers, but I think guns in Canada are much more a rural thing than in the US. Well, in the US it's an everywhere thing.
Posted by: Rich Wilson | October 8, 2009 5:18 PM
Rich: I'm actually not sure. With almost every party in the discussion tending to be dishonest it is very hard to know. What do you define as gun ownership? Guns per person? Percent of persons who own one or more guns? Percent of households wiht guns?
And then, of course, I think it matters a lot to distinguish between handguns and long guns.
I'm pretty sure hand gun rates a) are way lower in Canada, and b) homicide rates across countries correlates very well with handgun ownership rates.
Guns don't kill people. Sometimes they miss.
Posted by: Greg Laden | October 8, 2009 5:25 PM
That's kind of my point. In my 25 years in Canada I met one person with a hand gun (which was illegal). (And he was an American). (And he used to work for MS...)
I knew a few people who had hunting rifles and shotguns, mostly when I lived in a rural area (small town in the Kootenays). In cities nobody I knew had or wanted guns. Granted, 'people I know' is pretty selective and certainly not a random sample. But when I moved to Atlanta, even people who I would not have thought would have hand guns at home did.
What really struck me as a 'foreigner' was the story in the news about a guy who was at a car repo place, and some other unrelated person showed up wanting to get stuff from their car and was brandishing a gun. So the first person shot him (I presume before the car repo business owner could). And that was the end of it, at least as far as the media was concerned. No questions, no investigation, no anything. I'm not saying the guy didn't have the right to defend himself with his gun (not saying he did either), but that it was almost not newsworthy struck me as odd.
I ramble.
I also got a lot less militant in my bike riding after the story in which a car and truck tried to merge into the same lane. Truck won. A couple of miles down the road the car driver put a bullet through the cab of the truck injuring the truck owner's young son.
Posted by: Rich Wilson | October 8, 2009 5:48 PM
I used to live in Boston. Say no more.
Posted by: Greg Laden | October 8, 2009 6:30 PM
Rural Canada is full of rifles and shotguns, hand guns not so much.
Posted by: GaryB | October 8, 2009 8:55 PM
Hand guns are very hard to aquire in Canada. When I got mine, Ineeded my regular permit plus a police interview when I registered it. That was 15 years ago, the rules are probably tighter now. You need travel permit to transport it to the shooting range. When not in use, all guns must be stored in a locked room or gun safe with either a trigger lock or the bolt removed. Ammunition must be stored in a locked container seperate from the firearms. Not many guns in the city except for people who have a hunt camp up north.
Posted by: David W | October 8, 2009 9:27 PM
I live in a small town in the Kootenays (Trail) (Hi Rich where were you?) and I seldom see anyone with rifle racks etc. I suspect a large % people living more rural than me probably have a long gun simply to protect their livestock from marauding bears, coyotes and cougars. Canada's gun laws are far stricter than those in the US and so far as I'm concerned we have the crime stats to support those laws.
Posted by: Doug Alder | October 18, 2009 11:44 PM
The only handguns I have seen were in the possession of police, and in museums (presumably because they were old). I've seen ordinary folks with rifles. My grandmother hunts deer for food with a 12-gauge in fact.
(My grandmother is pretty awesome.)
Posted by: Jason Thibeault | October 19, 2009 10:08 AM