Morbid but interesting
I am perversely heartened by the the summary of the year's Toronto-area murders published in the Star yesterday. Looking through it, I conclude that if you're not connected to the underworld and you're not dating or related to anyone with violent tendencies, your odds of being killed by another human being are very, very slim in this city. If you want something to be paranoid about, you're probably better off worrying about dying by falling down the stairs.
The other datum I glean from the summary is that the gang- and mob-related murders seem mostly to have been carried out with firearms, while the others are mostly stabbings and strangulations. I think this raises an interesting question about gun control.
Critics of various firearms safety regulations like to point out that gun control is useless because criminals don't acquire and register their guns through legitimate channels anyway. This seems to be true if we're talking about the gangland murders. However, it's interesting to note that the murder weapons in the domestic slayings are mostly something other than firearms. Are the current laws and regulations keeping guns out of the hands of the kinds of murderers who don't belong to larger criminal organizations? If that's the case, then I would say that the current laws are still useful.
On a related tangent, supposing that violent independent criminals are being prevented from buying guns, how much is that affecting the murder rate? Is there a way to quantify whether someone is less likely to die if the same would-be murderer attacks them with a knife rather than a gun? My gut feeling is they're safer without the gun in the equation, but only marginally so in the kind of close indoor environments where domestic violence usually takes place.
My conclusion from all this is that firearms issues should really be seen as two separate problems: how to deal with gang violence and how to deal with the more independent kind of behavior. Public policy solutions to one problem may or may not work for the other one, and vice versa.
The other datum I glean from the summary is that the gang- and mob-related murders seem mostly to have been carried out with firearms, while the others are mostly stabbings and strangulations. I think this raises an interesting question about gun control.
Critics of various firearms safety regulations like to point out that gun control is useless because criminals don't acquire and register their guns through legitimate channels anyway. This seems to be true if we're talking about the gangland murders. However, it's interesting to note that the murder weapons in the domestic slayings are mostly something other than firearms. Are the current laws and regulations keeping guns out of the hands of the kinds of murderers who don't belong to larger criminal organizations? If that's the case, then I would say that the current laws are still useful.
On a related tangent, supposing that violent independent criminals are being prevented from buying guns, how much is that affecting the murder rate? Is there a way to quantify whether someone is less likely to die if the same would-be murderer attacks them with a knife rather than a gun? My gut feeling is they're safer without the gun in the equation, but only marginally so in the kind of close indoor environments where domestic violence usually takes place.
My conclusion from all this is that firearms issues should really be seen as two separate problems: how to deal with gang violence and how to deal with the more independent kind of behavior. Public policy solutions to one problem may or may not work for the other one, and vice versa.