Canadian case shows gun control laws won't prevent mass shooting

In April 1999, a 14-year-old boy entered his high school with a sawed-off .22   caliber rifle and shot two students, killing one of them. Another example of   how our scandalously lax gun control laws foster senseless bloodshed?   Actually, no. The shootings took place in a small town in Canada, which has   far stricter gun-control laws than we do.

   Does this incident, or another April 1999 shooting spree by a gunman in Ottawa   that killed four people, tell you much about the value of Canada?s gun laws?   No -- mass public shootings are such freak occurrences that they are almost   impossible to explain. But plenty of people take recent attacks here as   slam-dunk proof that American gun control laws are terribly inadequate.
   Proposals for change abound: requiring background checks of purchasers at gun   shows, mandating trigger locks for all weapons, tightening the existing ban   on assault weapons, outlawing large-capacity magazines, registration of all   guns, banning all handguns or even banning all firearms. But none of these   promise to reduce violent crime, and they have close to zero relevance to the   sort of attacks that have captured so much public attention. Some of them   could even make things worse.

   Background checks at gun shows would shut off one legal avenue available to   convicted felons looking to arm themselves, but there are plenty of illegal   methods for getting guns -- stealing them, buying them from other criminals   and even making them at home, which is a fairly simple task. Requiring guns   to be locked up will frustrate only non-owners and juveniles, assuming the   kids don't know where to find the key. (The boy who allegedly shot six   students in Conyers, Ga., in May 1999, broke into a locked gun cabinet.)   Neither measure would have prevented Mark Barton, an adult with no criminal   record, from gaining access to the two handguns he used to kill nine people   at two brokerages in Atlanta.

   So should we ban handguns? If the gunman who shot five people at a Jewish   community center in Los Angeles had used a shotgun instead of a pistol, there   would have been five fatalities instead of none.

   Australia's ban on handguns didn't stop a killer from shooting 54 people, 35   of them fatally, in a 1996 rampage in Tasmania: He resorted to rifles.

   Prohibiting assault weapons or oversized magazines is more futile still. An   assault weapon is nothing more than an ordinary rifle with a military   appearance. It can?t do anything a non-assault weapon can't do just as   quickly and destructively. Few madmen need 50-round clips to accomplish their   mission. They can reload quickly, or they can bring more than one gun.   Thinking these measures will prevent episodes of mass murder is like thinking   you can reduce drunk driving by banning Budweiser.

   So we could take the route suggested by Time magazine essayist Roger   Rosenblatt and ?get rid of the damned things entirely. But that option runs   against a fact of reality as large and daunting as the Grand Tetons -- there   are some 200 million guns in private hands in this country, and trying to get   rid of all or even most of them would be an impossible undertaking. (Probably   unconstitutional, too.) Many otherwise upstanding citizens would not be   willing to give up their guns, no matter what the law says.

   Criminals, of course, would keep their weapons as an essential tool of their   livelihood. And that exposes one of the deep perversities of gun control: It   is most likely to keep firearms away from people who wouldn?t misuse them,   and least likely to affect the behavior of people who are truly dangerous. By   depriving law-abiding folks of the best means for self-defense, gun   restrictions unquestionably make life safer for the bad guys.

   This is not just idle speculation. Yale University scholar John Lott has   documented that states passing laws allowing citizens to get concealed-weapon   permits typically see their murder rates drop by 10 percent. More recently,   he and University of Chicago law professor William Landes have found that   these ?conceal-carry? laws also appear to reduce the toll of multiple-victim   public shootings? -- by deterring would-be killers and giving victims a way   to fight back.
   After the 1996 slaughter, the Australian government outlawed semi-automatic   and pump-action shotguns. As part of the deal, it bought back 640,000 guns   from their private owners. The result? In the first year of the new ban, the   murder rate rose 3.2 percent and armed robberies were up 44 percent.

   Facts like these may be of little interest to Americans who are willing to   jump at almost any proposal that promises to stop the next mass murderer from   carrying out his mission. But horror is not a substitute for thought, and no   solution is better than the wrong solution.

   To find out more about Steve Chapman, and read features by other Creators   Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at   www.creators.com.
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