[lbo-talk] American guns, Canadian violence

mike larkin mike_larkin2001 at yahoo.com
Wed Aug 10 17:54:05 PDT 2005


"The unrelenting stream of gunplay drew alarmed reaction from politicians, including Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, and it didn't take long for someone to point a finger south. Mayor David Miller, among others, singled out the U.S. as a prime source of gangland weapons on Canadian streets, saying the guns that come over the border are "very easily accessible to these kinds of thugs."

If the experience of Canada's border agents is anything to go by, Miller is right. In the past five years, authorities have seized more than 5,400 firearms coming into the country from the United States, a figure believed to represent a fraction of the northward flow. The lion's share of those weapons -- some 3,695 -- were handguns, which tells you something about who was doing the buying. Pistols, after all, are the tools of the urban street gang, and a threefold growth in gang-related killings since the mid-1990s is the one glaring exception to Canada's overall decline in violent crime. At the same time, handguns have been steadily supplanting long-barrelled guns as weapons of choice in gun homicides, reflecting what experts see as a critical shift in the nature of violent crime in Canada. "Overall, there are more gang and drug-related killings, and fewer family killings," says Tom Gabor, a University of Ottawa criminologist. "Those involved in the former seem to have a preference for handguns, many of which are unregistered and likely smuggled into the country."....."

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/canada/article.jsp?content=20050815_110483_110483

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