Oh, Canada
Folks in Toronto live in fear of gun violence. In the past, the politicos there blamed US guns claiming that over half of the guns used in crime came from here. Of course, that number was completely made up. Since that was made up, they now blame US guns (though they don’t give a number) and our gun culture:
Residents of Canada’s biggest city are living in fear of increasing gun violence and blame their neighbour, the United States, for exporting their gun culture and weapons north, officials told AFP.
Area police reported hundreds of shootings this year, including 46 homicides. Some 1,782 guns were seized, including a cache of illegal weapons confiscated from a local online retailer this week — Canada’s first such bust that included a bullet-proof baseball cap and a military gas mask.
A bullet proof baseball cap? I thought this registry was supposed to fix all this stuff.
November 14th, 2005 at 12:21 pm
Toronto has had 46 gun-related homicides so far this year? Is that just the city of Toronto or the greater area? The city of Toronto has a little over 2.5 million residents, while the greater area has about 5 million. If 46 homicides raises their hackles, it must be an awfully nice place to be. The closest American city in terms of population is Chicago, with about 2.9 million residents; they had 448 murders in 2004. Toronto had 64 murders in 2004.
But Chicago is, of course, an anti-gun city, so let’s look at Houston (population ~1.9 million), probably the most gun-friendly large city in the country. It had 275 murders in 2004 — almost 40% fewer than in Chicago, but still almost 430% of Toronto’s total.
So let’s look at the 2004 numbers:
Chicago: 154.5 homicides per million residents
Houston: 144.7 homicides per million residents
Toronto: 25.6 homicides per million residents
Seems the Canadians have a much lower fear tolerance than we do. I’m not sure if that speaks poorly of them or of us… I’d say given those numbers I’d rather be unarmed in Toronto than armed in Chicago!
November 14th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
I was in Toronto a while back. Nice place. Their extraordinarily aggressive beggars got on my nerves but I never once felt threatened in any way.
November 14th, 2005 at 12:26 pm
And yes, I realize after clicking “post” that I conflate the terms “homicide” and “murder” even though those terms are technically and legally different. All murders are homicides, but not all homicides are murders. Chicago and Houston reported “murders,” while Toronto reported “homicides.” So in effect, you’d expect Toronto’s murder count to be even lower.
It’ll be interesting to see what the resident Canadian (aka Manish) has to say.
November 14th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
Yeah, the panhandlers are a problem in T.O., and there’s a lot of graffiti, too. But otherwise, I love the city.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
As to the half of guns thing…I vaguely remember once seeing actual numbers that showed that about half of all guns confiscated (or some other such statistic) in Canada were from the US, but I googled for it a while back and couldn’t find it. The “half” thing might have some basis that the official in Gunner’s piece wasn’t aware of, though its a statistic thats been floating around for a long time, so who really knows how it got started.
As tgirsch notes, yes, Toronto is a heck of a lot safer than other major American cities. To my knowledge, the 46 homicides occured in the city of Toronto which has about 2.5M – 3.0M. Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with gun control but rather more cultural issues. As Michael Moore noted in BfC, Canada has about as many guns as the United States per capita.
Beyond that, what you are seeing in Canada is the universal desire/requirement of the populace and its politicians to do something. Whenever stuff goes wrong, we have to do something. So what you are seeing are proposals for new laws, new policies and blaming someone other than ourselves. As I see it (and I realize that I’m about to start a flame war), it’s little different than some of the people who supported going to war with Iraq. A lot of people were saying “Well, we’ve got to do something”.
The panhandlers in Toronto seem to get worse and worse, was never that bad when I was growing up.
November 14th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
I thought Canada only had one third the number of guns per capita compared to the U.S.