Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 03:57:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: [B--dy--d] at [aol.com]
To: Multiple recipients of list <[n--b--n] at [Mainstream.net]>
Subject: Re: Janet Reno

In a message dated 98-08-05 16:21:39 EDT, [l--a--l] at [inetnebr.com] writes:

<< This is great material.  Can you give me the cite to either download this
 report or to be able to go to the library and get a copy?
 
 This stuff flies directly into the face of what we have been told.<<

    I have made some minimal effort to investigate this.
Evidently, the ICVS report is available from Statistics
Canada for a significant charge. The report received 
somewhat more attention in England. 

    Here is the cite that brought it to my attention. I verified
the article last spring. "The Edmonton Journal" does have a web
site as does Statistics Canada.
                                 *******
Canadians suffer as much crime as Americans

by LORNE GUNTER
appeared in the Edmonton Journal 31.3.98

Lost last week by Canadian newspapers and networks, amid their
sanctimonious tut-tutting about the mass killing in a Jonesboro, Ark.
schoolyard, was the release of The Third International Crime
Victimization Survey (ICVS).

In part, this is justifiable. Five simultaneous murders is a bigger
story than the release of yet another dry statistical report,
especially when four of the victims are children and the fifth their
pregnant teacher.

The shortcoming lies in the Canadian moral clucking surrounding the
Jonesboro shootings versus the silence over the implications of the
ICVS.

The CBC English television network directly blamed the National Rifle
Association for the five deaths in Arkansas. To hear its report, one
would think NRA vice-president Charlton Heston had had his finger on
the trigger.

John Bierman of the Financial Post shrieked "It's the gun culture,
stupid," which is true in a way, but not the way Bierman means. Then
he called on the Americans to emulate Canada or Britain and implement
strict controls on guns.

Bierman, and several other Canadian commentators who mimicked his
knee-jerk reaction, ignore at least three significant points. Canada's
gun laws were already quite strict when a madman killed 14 female
students at the Universite du Montreal in 1989, and yet the laws did
not save them (nor will the even stricter laws being implemented this
fall prevent future madmen from committing similar mass killings).
Mass killings are committed with machetes, bombs and other weapons,
too, and their cause perplexes psychologists and sociologists. And, if
the cause of a crime is cultural, a change to gun laws will be
virtually powerless to alter it.

Which is why it was unforgivable that Canadian journalists should have
overlooked the ICVS.

Canadians have smug attitudes towards the United States on a number of
subjects; health care, welfare and crime among them. While in each
case our smugness is undeserved, it is especially undeserved on crime.
Like several studies before it, the ICVS shows that except for murder,
Canadians suffer as much violent crime as Americans, and more
non-violent crime. Our view of all America as the final shootout from
a John Wayne movie and all Canada as an idyllic scene from Anne of
Green Gables is simplistic, arrogant and wrong; it borders on outright
prejudice.

According to the ICVS, which is conducted here by Statistics Canada,
25 percent of Canadians were the victim of a crime in 1996 versus 24
per cent of Americans. Six per cent of Canucks suffered a violent
crime `a robbery, armed robbery, sexual assault or common assault'
versus seven percent of Americans.

The highest incidence of violent crime in the industrialized world was
in England and Wales, where eight per cent of residents were
victimized in 1996 (and total victimization is 40 per cent higher than
in the U.S.) and where gun laws are even stricter than in Canada.

Household burglaries and car thefts were as high in Canada as in the
U.S (in England and France they were 50 per cent higher than in North
America), with the added proviso that burglaries in Canada are more
than four times as likely to occur when the residents are home as they
are in the U.S. Theft of other personal property was 50 per cent
higher north of the 49th parallel, than south.

The vastly higher murder rate in the U.S. is an important difference.
But it certainly does not justify our gun laws, nor discredit theirs.

For more than a century, American murder rates have been three to 10
times higher than those of other western nations. And the differences
in rates have remained reasonably constant before and after the
introduction of strict gun laws in Canada, Britain, Australia, Japan,
New Zealand and elsewhere. Indeed, the murder rates in other
industrialized nations have inched closer to those in the U.S. despite
various attempts to register all guns or license all gun owners, or
even ban guns altogether.

For some reason, Americans see murder as a solution to their problems,
murder with guns, murder with knives, murder with fists, much more
often than do the citizens of other western nations.

The difference lies in their culture, not just their `gun culture'.
Crimes of all sorts, including murder, are lowest in those states with
the highest rates of gun ownership. States such as Vermont, New
Hampshire, North Dakota and Montana, where gun ownership is at least
twice what it is in Canada, have murder rates as low as one-half that
in the provinces which are their immediate neighbours.

The ICVS points out what Interpol and others have also pointed out,
Canadians have no reason to be smug about crime, or about gun laws.
                                      **********

Regards,
Dennis Baron