Canadian Gun registry hits rough waters

[Thrawn]

Originally posted by lazs2
You don't get it thrawn you flaming hypocrite... we don't need you coming here and trying to take away my 2nd amendment rights.

I have never gone to the US and tried to take away your second amendment rights.

You have come to my country and broken our laws.

It was your citizens that were only too happy to "break the law"  

I'm sorry lazs, what law did they break exactly?

they did not seem all that happy with the status quo...

Nice thing about living in democracy.  The type of nation that majority of the people want to live in is generally what the law of the land reflects.

they seemed very worried that we might get caught by the nannies tho.

If they were breaking the law then they better worry about the  police.  Do you refer to police officers upholding the law of the land in the US "nannies", as well?

I think your being hypocritical, because although I might disagree with some of the laws in the US, I certainly don't go there and and break them.   Where as you, disagree with people tell you how your country should be run, and then go to a foreign nation and actually break it's laws.

[Pongo]

171 firearms related homicides in a year..for a population of 30 million..weap about that lazs

[beet1e]

Every one of them is going around now with the memory of a good time shared that involved a handgun

Geez, Lazs - I hope you didn't run out of KY jelly, and I hope you wiped off the barrel between "usages".

[Thrawn]

"Every one of them is going around now with the memory of a good time shared that involved a handgun"

I'm sure some people have fond memories of doing crack, doesn't make it legal.

[loser]

Beetle please, dont be a tard.

Now laz, I have a couple questions that i hope you will answer.

1.  Why do you "need" a handgun or any other firearm. Is it for personal and family protection? So if a burglar comes into your house with a gun, you can shoot him?  Do you realize that more family members or innocent people are killed in "accidental discharge situations" than criminals?

Besides that, if you hear your window smashed at 4 am, you arent gonna shoot worth chit. You will end up hitting a family member who is panicking worse that you are (if that is possible.)

2.  How does not owning a gun make you "un-American"

I know im reading into your posts. But i dont think it is a stretch.  It seems that you pride yourself on owning a gun and you go so far as to define yourself by that same fact.  "there is no laz if said laz isnt holding a gun."

Call me on that if you will, but that is the message that you send.  

Most Americans do not own or use firearms of any sort.  My experience with over-excited gun owners such as yourself is always the same.  But the sad truth :  YOU ARE NOT A COWBOY AND YOU ARE NOT JOHN WAYNE!!!!

So laz, and other.  One last question....

Have you ever shot at someone and killed them with your handgun?

No?  yeah that is what i thought...

So you get all in a huff for owning a gun for absolutely no reason.

[SirLoin]

The "safest" thing to do if someone enters your home,is NOT to confront the intruder...Call police if you can..collect family,lock/barracade room door and bail out the window if possible...DO NOT go looking!!!

[ra]

pffffffffffffft

[Toad]

Originally posted by SirLoin
Lazs..You need to see "Bowling For Columbine"'.

Saw it.

While he pursued mutlitple lines of thought, I didn't really feel he brought any of them to a convincing conclusion.

It's almost "who didn't he blame"? No real suggestion on how to solve the problem either. The recurring theme seemed to me to be "how come the Canadians can have all those guns and not have the high homicide rate?" He didn't convincingly answer that one either.

It poses some good questions.. that's about it.

[beet1e]

Loser - you do realise that you're opening the floodgates, don't you? If Lazs or anyone else of the same mindset answers your questions, this is going to go on and on. If you missed the earlier threads, I can supply the URLs.

Mr. Toad!  I'm trying to get hold of Bowling for Columbine. Is it out on DVD yet? I want to see it while it's still topical, and would be delighted if someone would send me the DVD in the mail for full reimbursement. I realise that the recording format in the US is different, but I have a friend with a multi-region player.

[lazs2]

loser... that was pretty funny... yeah.. yu may be reading just a "little" into the things I have never said.

No.... more people are not killed as family members and "accidental discharges" than criminals.. the stats are squewed to include wives shooting abusive husbands... neighbors breaking and entering... it is also true that most people "know" their murderer.. nothing to do with guns.

not having a gun doesn't make you un American... being a canadian makes not an American tho if that is what you mean... I have never said different.   How does lieing about what I have said help your case?  whatever it is..

What have I said that infers that I am any less or more depending on weather I have a firearm or not.  I do feel that one should allways use the proper tool for the proper job and that bringing a gun to a knife fight is a pretty good idea.

I have not claimed to be John Wayne I believe that you may have made that up... Again... How does lieing about what I say help your case?   And... what exactly is your case except that you have notions about me that you are upset with?

And... I have used handguns in 3 situations that I can recall where I believe that the handgun made the situation come out better...  Everyone stayed very polite because of the gun...even if it didn't... there are 3,000,000 crimes a year stopped by firearms..  No... I haven't killed anyone.   What does that have to do with it?   It proves you don't know what you speak of... no accidentally shooting family members... no "gun accidents" resulting in injury or death.   As for me not being able to shoot for toejam at 4 am... I really wouldn't count on that.   and besides.. The reason we don't have "hot" burglaries here is because the burglars don't want to face a gun.  

Now I gotta ask you.... as a canadian..... what do you care?   I also gotta ask.... In view of all the overwhelming evidence that guns are a good thing in America.... How do you justify your hysterical  and unreasonable fear of them?   do you suffer from some neurosis?   Perhaps it is just a personal thing?   you dislike me so you make yourself look foolish to lash out?   Don't be offended... I'm just trying to get at the truth in the same manner as you.   Keeping up the dispasionate debate so to speak.  
lazs

[lazs2]

thrawn... crack?   LOL... Target shooting with a handgun likened to crack addiction?  

sirloin... the facts don't bear you out.  In America... resisting with a firearm you are four times less likely to be injured if you are a woman than if you don't resist at all.   If you are a man the number is 1.4 times.  
lazs

[Dune]

From ReasonOnline

Cold Comfort
Economist John Lott discusses the benefits of guns--and the hazards of pointing them out.

Interviewed by Jacob Sullum and Michael W. Lynch

Until recently, when he bought a 9-mm Ruger after his own research impressed upon him the value of gun ownership, John Lott had no personal experience with firearms, aside from one day of riflery in summer camp when he was 12. That fact did not stop a reviewer of Lott's 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press), from labeling him a "gun nut." Writing in The American Prospect, Edward Cohn also identified Lott as "a leading loon of the Chicago School of economics, known for its ultra-market ideology." But that was gentle--a backhanded compliment, even--compared to the attacks from anti-gun activists, who accused Lott of producing his landmark study at the behest of the gun industry.

Lott, now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, used to be the John M. Olin Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago. That position, like similar ones at other major universities, was endowed by a foundation based on the personal fortune of the late John M. Olin, former chairman of the Olin Corporation. Among many other things, the Olin Corporation makes Winchester ammunition. These facts led Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center to conclude that "Lott's work was, in essence, funded by the firearms industry"--a charge that was echoed by other gun control ad-vocates, including Charles Schumer, then a Democratic representative from New York and now a senator.

Never mind that assuming the Olin Foundation takes orders from "the firearms industry" is like assuming the Ford Foundation does the bidding of automakers. Never mind that Olin fellows are chosen by faculty committees, not by the foundation (with which Lott never had any contact). Proponents of gun control were desperate to discredit Lott, because his findings contradicted their dark predictions about what would happen if states allowed law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns.

Analyzing 18 years of data for more than 3,000 counties, Lott found that violent crime drops significantly when states switch from discretionary permit policies, which give local officials the authority to determine who may carry a gun, to "shall issue" or "right-to-carry" laws, which require that permits be granted to everyone who meets certain objective criteria. That conclusion, first set forth in a 1997 paper that Lott co-authored with David Mustard, now an economist at the University of Georgia, heartened defenders of gun ownership and dismayed their opponents. Arguing that "shall issue" laws are beneficial, while other gun laws are ineffective at best, Lott quickly became one of the most widely cited--and reviled--scholars in the gun control debate.

Though it was the gun issue that brought Lott notoriety, it hasn't been the focus of his career. The 41-year-old economist, who earned his Ph.D. at UCLA, has published papers on a wide variety of topics, including professional licensing, criminal punishment, campaign finance, and public education. Last summer he published Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (University of Chicago Press), a skeptical look at theories of predatory pricing, and he is working on a book about the reputational penalties faced by criminals, a longstanding interest. In addition to his positions at Yale and the University of Chicago, Lott has served as chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission and taught at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania, among other schools. He lives in Swarth-more, Pennsylvania, with his wife and four children. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum and Washington Editor Michael Lynch talked to Lott at his Yale Law School office in mid-October.


Reason: How did you become interested in guns?

John R. Lott Jr.: About six years ago, I was teaching a class dealing with crime issues at the University of Pennsylvania, and it dawned on me that my students would be interested in some papers on gun control. It forced me to look at the literature systematically to decide what papers to assign to the class. I was shocked by how poorly done the existing research on guns and crime was.

You had very small samples. By far the largest previous study on guns and crime had looked at just 170 cities within a single year, 1980. Most of the rest looked at, say, 24 counties or 24 cities within a single year. No one had tried to account for things like arrest rates or conviction rates or prison sentence lengths. And the studies were all very limited in the sense that they were purely cross-sectional, where you look at the crime rates across jurisdictions in one year, or [purely longitudinal], where you pick one city or one county and look at it over time.

It was basically because of that class that I saw the benefit to going out and trying to do it right. So I put together what I think is by far the largest study that's ever been done on crime. The book has data on all 3,000-plus counties in the U.S. over an 18-year period. And simply having that large a data set allows you to account for hundreds of factors, thousands of factors, that you couldn't have accounted for in those smaller data sets.

Reason: What has been the most gratifying response to the book? Do you know of any criminologists whose views have been changed by your research?

Lott: Some well-known people like [University of Pennsylvania criminologist] John DiIulio and [UCLA political scientist] James Q. Wilson have said very nice things about the study. I think it's caused DiIulio to look at these issues differently, and there are other criminologists I know of who have been amazed by how strong the data are. I've done lots of empirical studies, and the regularities that you see here, in terms of the drops in violent crimes right after these laws go into effect, are very dramatic.

The intensity of the issue on both sides is something I wouldn't have expected before I got into it. I've been involved in a lot of debates, and people tell me, "You should have anticipated this before you did the study." But I've written about 80 academic articles, and the interest in this has been so outside the range of experiences I've had before. With the vast majority of articles, you're happy if you can get 10 people to read it.

Reason: The thrust of your argument in More Guns, Less Crime is easy enough to understand. But the details of the evidence you cite are hard to follow for anyone who is not trained in econometrics. Does it bother you that people who support the right to keep and bear arms are apt to accept your conclusions at face value, while those who are inclined to support gun control will tend to reject your findings, even though few people in either group are equipped to evaluate the evidence?

[Dune]

Lott: My guess is that [my critics] assume that the vast majority of people who hear their claims are not going to even look at the book. So they say, "Lott didn't account for poverty." Or they say, "Lott didn't account for other types of gun laws." Those are things that are easy to evaluate: Either I did, or I didn't. But I think they feel that they can get away with making those claims, because it'll be only a tiny fraction of 1 percent who will go and buy the book or get it from the library. I've never been involved in a debate like this, because in your normal academic debate, where there are 10 people involved and they've all read the paper, if somebody says, "Professor X didn't account for other gun laws," everybody else in the room would laugh, because they would know it was an absurd claim.

I don't think that most of the comments [the critics] are making are really that difficult to understand. One of the claims, for instance, is that I'm assuming that when these laws are passed there will be a one-time drop in violent crime rates, and it should be the same across all places that adopt these laws. That's absurd. I don't know how much time I spend in the book saying that the level of deterrence is related, according to the data, to the probability that people are going to be able to defend themselves, and the rate at which people get permits changes over time. When you pass these laws, not everybody who eventually is going to get a permit does it the first day. Fifteen years after these laws go into effect, you're still seeing an increasing percentage of the population getting these permits and a decreasing rate of violent crime because of the additional deterrence.

I spend lots of time in the book talking about why you don't expect the drop in crime to be the same in all places....In more urban areas [of states with discretionary permit laws], public officials were especially reluctant to issue permits. So when you change to a nondiscretionary rule, the biggest increases in permits tended to be in these urban areas, and that is where you observe the biggest drops in violent crime.

Reason: Your analysis shows that liberal carry permit policies are associated with lower crime rates even after controlling for a variety of factors that might also have an impact on crime. In the book you concede that some other variable that you did not consider could be responsible for this association. Yet at the end of the book, you write, "Will allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns save lives? The answer is yes, it will." Do statements like that go too far?

Lott: I don't think so. That's one of the last sentences in the book, and at that point the evidence is pretty overwhelming. There are different types of information, and they're all pointing in the same direction.

After these laws are adopted, you see a drop in violent crime, and it continues over time as the percentage of the population with permits increases. If I look at neighboring counties on either side of a state border, when one state passes its right-to-carry law, I see a drop in violent crime in that county, but the other county, right across the state border, in a state without a right-to-carry law, sees an increase in its violent crime rate. You try to control for differences in the legal system, arrest and conviction rates, different types of laws, demographics, poverty, drug prices --all sorts of things. You look at something like that, and I think it's pretty hard to come up with some other explanation. I think you're seeing some criminals move [across the state line].

You find the types of people who benefit the most from these laws. The biggest drops in crime are among women and the elderly, who are physically weaker, and in the high-crime, relatively poor areas where people are most vulnerable.

There are five or six things that one could point to that confirm different parts of the theory. I haven't heard anybody come up with a story that explains all these different pieces of evidence....Since you have all these states changing their laws at different times, it becomes harder and harder to think of some left-out factor that just happened to be changing in all these different states at the same time the right-to-carry law got changed.

Reason: A review of your book in The American Prospect claims that "his results are skewed by the inclusion of data from tiny counties with trivial rates of violent crime. In fact, when you consider only large counties and exclude Florida from the sample, his case completely falls apart." How do you respond?

Lott: When you drop out counties with fewer than 100,000 people, if anything it actually increases the size of the effect. What [the reviewer is] saying is that if you not only drop out counties with fewer than 100,000 people--which is 86 percent of the counties in the sample, so it's not just a few small counties that we're talking about--but also drop out Florida, then the changes in two of the violent crime categories, when you're just looking at the simple before-and-after averages, aren't statistically significant. But the results still imply a drop, and for robberies and aggravated assaults you still get a drop that's statistically significant.

Now, I think it's somewhat misleading to look only at the simple before-and-after averages. Take the case where violent crime rates are rising right up to the point when the law goes into effect and falling afterward, and let's say it was a perfectly symmetrical inverted V. If I were to take the average crime rate before the law goes into effect and the average afterward, where the point of the V is when the law changed, they're going to be the same. Does that mean the law had no impact? When you drop Florida from the sample, [the results] look more like this inverted V than they do when Florida is in there. So I would argue that it strengthens the results, if what you care about is the change in direction.

In any case, the bottom line to me is this: I wanted all the data that were available....I didn't pick and choose, and when somebody drops out 86 percent of the counties along with Florida, you know they must have tried all sorts of combinations. This wasn't the first obvious combination that sprang to mind. And it's the only combination they report....If, after doing all these gymnastics, and recording only one type of specification, dealing with before-and-after averages that are biased against finding a benefit, they still find only benefits, and no cost, to me that strengthens the results.

Reason: Do you still hear the argument that you're in the pay of the gun industry, or has that been discredited?

Lott: I think the gun control people are going to continue to bring it up. I've been in debates this year with people from Handgun Control Inc. and other gun control groups in which they asserted flat-out that I've been paid by gun makers to do this study.

Reason: When they raise this charge, how successful are you in making the point that people should be able to assess evidence and arguments on their merits and that your motives don't matter?

Lott: Well, most people aren't going to look at the data. They're not going to have the data in front of them. The credibility of the data and the message depends on whether or not they believe that the person who's telling them about the data is credible. And I think the gun control groups feel that it's a win to the extent that they even divert three minutes of a show to talking about this issue. Even if it doesn't stick in people's minds, it's still three minutes that I couldn't talk about something else.

Reason: In a working paper you wrote with University of Chicago law professor William Landes [available at papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=161637], you conclude that "shall issue" laws are especially effective at preventing mass public shootings. Given that the people who commit these crimes seem to be pretty unbalanced, if not suicidal, how does the deterrent work?

Lott: Most of these attacks do end in the death of the attackers themselves, frequently from suicide, but also because they're killed by others. But part of what's motivating them is the desire to harm other people, and to the extent that you can take that away from them, I think you reduce their incentive to engage in these attacks. Whether they do it just because they intrinsically value killing people or whether they do it because of the publicity, the fact that there might be a citizen there who can stop them well before the police are able to arrive takes away, in their warped minds, some of the gain from the crime, and stops a lot of them from doing it.

[Dune]

Reason: You often say, based on surveys, that Americans use guns to fend off criminals more than 2 million times a year. But in the book, you note that people who report incidents of armed self-defense could be mistaken or lying. How big a problem is that, and how confident can we be that the true number is more than 2 million?

Lott: Well, 2 million is the average of the various surveys. Different problems may plague different surveys, and the problems can go in both directions. You may have questions that weed out people who shouldn't be weeded out.

Reason: Like "Do you own a gun?"

Lott: Or it could be you ask them "Has a crime been committed against you?" before you ask them whether they've used a gun defensively.

Reason: And they might not consider it a crime if it wasn't completed?

Lott: Right. And so, we have errors that can exist on both sides....But that's the only type of evidence that we have on this....The most striking thing to me is the comparison between the results from these surveys and [survey data on] the number of violent crimes that are committed with guns each year. You see many more crimes that are averted by people who defend themselves with guns. I think that difference--even though both sets of numbers can be tainted for all the same reasons--is what's striking.

Reason: You say that resistance with a gun is the safest option when confronted by a criminal. What's the basis for that conclusion?

Lott: You hear claims from time to time that people should behave passively when they're confronted by a criminal. And if you push people on that, they'll refer to something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, a government project that surveys about 50,000 households each year. If you compare passive behavior to all forms of active resistance lumped together, passive behavior is indeed slightly safer than active resistance. But that's very misleading, because under the heading of active resistance you're lumping together things like using your fist, yelling and screaming, running away, using Mace, a baseball bat, a knife, or a gun. Some of those actions are indeed much more dangerous than passive behavior. But some are much safer.

For a woman, for example, by far the most dangerous course of action to take when she's confronted by a criminal is to use her fists. The reason is pretty simple: You're almost always talking about a male criminal doing the attacking, so in the case of a female victim there's a large strength differential. And for a woman to use her fists is very likely to result in a physical response from the attacker and a high probability of serious injury or death to the woman. For women, by far the safest course of action is to have a gun. A woman who behaves passively is 2.5 times as likely to end up being seriously injured as a woman who has a gun.

Reason: Why does the mainstream press seem to downplay the value of armed self-defense?

Lott: One question is, Why don't they report people using guns defensively? If I have two stories, one where there's a dead body on the ground vs. another where, say, a woman has brandished a gun and a would-be rapist or murderer has run away, with no shots fired and no dead body on the ground, it's pretty obvious to me which one of those is going to be considered more newsworthy. It doesn't require any conspiracy. Now if we care about policy, if we care about what types of actions are going to save the most lives, or prevent the most crimes, we want to look at both of those cases: not only the newsworthy bad events but the bad events that never become newsworthy because they don't occur.

But I don't think that explains everything. One example is gun deaths involving children. My guess is that if you go out and ask people, how many gun deaths involve children under age 5, or under age 10, in the United States, they're going to say thousands. When you tell them that in 1996 there were 17 gun deaths for children under age 5 in the United States and 44 for children under age 10, they're just astounded. There's a reason why they believe these deaths occur much more frequently: If you have a gun death in the home involving a child under age 5, you're going to get national news coverage. Five times more children drown in bathtubs; more than twice as many drown in five-gallon water buckets around the home. But those deaths do not get national news coverage.

This type of news coverage has consequences, because it affects people's perceptions of the benefits and costs of having guns around. Concentrating on gun deaths in the home, exaggerating the risks of that, creates a false impression. People are going to die because of that false impression. They're not going to have guns in the home, even though that's by far the safest course of action for them to take when they're confronted by a criminal. You may prevent some of the accidental deaths, but you're going to create other types of deaths because people won't be able to defend themselves.

I think the debate would be so different now if, even once in a while, some of the life-saving uses of guns got some attention in the news. A couple of the public school shootings were stopped by citizens armed with guns well before the police were able to arrive. Or take the case of the day trader shooting in Atlanta, which got huge attention. Within 10 days after that, there were three separate attacks in the Atlanta area that were stopped by citizens with guns, in two cases permitted concealed handguns. They got no attention outside of the local media market.

[ra]

Hmmm, a guy named LOTT interviewed by a guy named LYNCH.  Yet another crack in the racist right wing facade!

ra