Liberalism Causes Homicide

 

Liberals like to blame gun owners for everything from gang wars to random mass murders.  The truth is liberals themselves are responsible for these symptoms of societal breakdown.

 

Another election, another Liberal threat to ban guns.  Two years ago Paul Martin promised to ban handguns.  Now, the Liberals seem to have temporarily lost interest in handguns.  Instead they want to ban semi-automatic rifles.  Fifteen years ago Liberals told us we needed to register all guns, license all gun owners, and ban short barreled handguns and military style rifles.  (These measures became law when Bill C-68 passed.)  Eighteen years ago the Mulroney government folded under pressure from the Liberals and banned converted autos and high capacity magazines.  Thirty years ago Pierre Trudeau banned full autos and instituted the FAC (Firearms Acquisition Certificate) system.

 

Although the focus of their attacks on gun owners has changed over the years, there is a consistent principle that underlies all of these measures.  Simply stated, liberals believe that any society with easily obtainable firearms will suffer from a high homicide rate.  Any laws that make guns more difficult to obtain legally will therefore cause the murder rate to drop.  Let us examine this theory to see how it stands up against historical trends.

 

The three graphs shown here represent the homicide rates in Canada from 1930 to 2006, the US from 1930 to 2004, and England from 1946 to 2006.  Look closely and you will see all three have a similar key characteristic.  Murder rates were low throughout the middle part of the twentieth century and remained that way until some time between 1964 and 1967.  At that point all three graphs begin curving sharply upward.  By 1980 homicide rates were two to three times higher than they had been fifteen years earlier.

 

 

If the gun-controllers are correct, then a person viewing these graphs would be forced to conclude that the 1950’s were a period of strict gun control.  By the same reasoning, the mid sixties must have been a time when governments suddenly relaxed restrictions on private gun ownership, causing the murder rate to spiral out of control.  This analysis has only one problem – the truth is the exact opposite.

 

Gun controls were much less restrictive in Canada, the US and Great Britain fifty years ago than they are today.  Americans could buy handguns from mail order ads in ‘Popular Mechanics’ magazine.  In this country, full autos (machine guns) could be legally purchased by anyone without a criminal record.   Converted autos were an unregulated, over the counter purchase.  Most high schools had small bore rifle ranges in their basements.  War surplus firearms were flooding into the country at bargain basement prices.  There was no such thing as a firearms license.  There were no safe storage laws.  There was no restriction on magazine capacity.  There were no government mandated safety courses.  A gun could be purchased at any hardware store as easily as a hammer or a saw.  Eaton’s and Simpson’s sold them mail order through their catalogues.  In today’s terms, there was almost no gun control at all.  How could the murder rate have been so low?  Even more surprising, from a gun control perspective, was the complete absence of random mass murders.  (The first such massacre I can find any reference to was the ‘Texas Tower’ shooting in 1966.) [1]

 

The late sixties were a period of increasing gun control everywhere.  The British were first with the Criminal Justice Act of 1967.  This legislation required anyone wishing to purchase a shotgun to obtain a police permit.  The following year the US instituted GCA 68, which prohibited mail order sales of firearms.  Canada passed C-150 in 1969.  This law essentially eliminated handgun carry permits.  None of these laws had the slightest effect on the rising tide of death.

 

Clearly, something happened in the period 1964 – 1967.  Some trend started then that continued until the late seventies, when it leveled off.  What could it have been? [2]

 

Anyone over the age of fifty can answer that question without hesitation.  These were the years when modern liberal values began displacing traditional conservative beliefs. And what have forty years of liberal values given us?  No fault divorce, broken families, single mothers, teenage pregnancy, partial birth abortion, gratuitous sex and violence on TV and in the movies, an epidemic of drug use, out of control immigration, rejection of religious values, plunging birth rates, ethnic gangs, illiterate high school graduates, a toothless criminal justice system, and hardly surprisingly, an increase in violent crime.

 

Fifty years ago, when these countries had strong social controls but little gun control, homicide rates were low and mass murders were unheard of.  Now, we have strong gun control but little social control.  Homicide rates are high, and mass murders occur with sickening regularity in all Western nations.  (In the past few years there have been mass shootings in Italy, France, Germany, Finland, Canada, and the US.  The media here tends to report only the North American occurrences.)

 

It is bad enough that liberals have turned most of the Western world into a stinking cesspool of socialism.  They then have the unmitigated gall to turn around and blame gun owners for the mess they have created.

 

John Orth January 2009

 

End Notes

 

  1. Of course, there were mass murders prior to this 1966 date.  The 1929 St. Valentines Day Massacre, where Al Capone’s gang massacred several members of a rival gang was a mass murder.  But the Texas Tower shooting was an entirely new category of mass murder, a random mass murder, something that (to the best of my knowledge) had never been seen before.  A random mass murder is essentially a suicide, but it is a suicide in which the perpetrator decides to take as many people with him as he can.

 

  1. The traditional reason given for this explosion of violence in the mid sixties is a demographic one – the first baby boomers were entering their twenties.  Since most crimes of violence are caused my young men, this spike in homicide rates is said to come from the large number of boomers just reaching the age where they could get into serious mischief.  There are three problems with this explanation.  First, it does not account for the sudden appearance of an entirely new phenomenon at exactly the same time – the random mass murder.  Second, the Canadian fertility rate between 1921 and 1930 averaged 3.30 live births per woman.   This is not a great deal less than the 3.80 recorded between 1951 and 1960, the peak boom years.  My mother (born 1919) was one of nine children who reached maturity in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Why was there no explosion of violence in this period?  Baby boomers were not the first large generation to come of age, but they were the first to come of age under a liberal values regime.

 

Finally, there were simply not enough boomers to cause the striking increase in homicide rates that we experienced. Canada’s homicide rate tripled between 1959 and 1974. If this huge increase was caused entirely by baby boomers reaching maturity, then the boom generation would clearly have needed to be three times as large as the preceding generation (the so called silent generation, born between 1930 and 1945).  In fact, Canada’s birth rate in the period 1931 – 1940 was 2.82 live births per woman, which means the baby boom generation was only about 35% larger than the silent generation.  To account for the homicide increase purely on the basis of numbers, it would have needed to be 300% larger.

 

Figures for birth rates were obtained from the book “The changing position of women in family and society” by Eugen Lupri page 49 Google Books January 23, 2009.

 

  1. Figures for the Canadian Homicide rate graph 1930 - 1960 were obtained from Observations on a One Way Street: The Canadian Firearm Control Debate published by the Shooting Organizations of Canada.

 

  1. Figures for the Canadian Homicide rate graph 1961 – 2006 were obtained from Homicide in Canada 2007 by Geoffrey Li, Statistics Canada.

       http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2008009/article/10671-eng.pdf

 

  1. Figures for the England and Wales Homicide rate graph 1946 – 1997 were obtained from the House of Commons Library Research Paper 99/56 May 1999 by Patsy Richards.

http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-056.pdf

           

  1. Figures for the England and Wales Homicide rate graph 1998 – 2006 were obtained from Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/2007, Home Office Statistical Bulletin, January 2008.  Page18.  These figures required conversion from offences currently recorded as homicides to offences initially recorded as homicides the match the old way of measuring homicide rate.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0308.pdf

     

  1. Figures for US homicide rates from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/hmrttab.htm