Tuesday, June 28, 2005

As boondoggles go...

...the firearms registry may not have been such a bad one:
It says that 816 people — 767 males and 49 females — died of firearms-related injuries in Canada in 2002, the most recent year examined in the study. This represented 2.6 deaths per 100,000 population, down from 5.9 per 100,000 in 1979, it said.

Among males, the 2002 rate was 4.9 deaths per 100,000, down from 10.6 in 1979. Among females, it was 0.3, down from 1.2.

In a cross-border comparison for the year 2000, Statistics Canada says the risk of firearms death was more than three times as great for American males as for Canadian males and seven times as great for American females as for Canadian females.

Because more of the U.S. deaths were homicides (as opposed to suicides or accidental deaths), the U.S. rate of gun homicide was nearly eight times Canada's, the agency says.

Can the gun registry take much credit? The study is inconclusive. Was it worth the cost? That's up for debate.

But at the very least, we can say fairly definitively that Canada's gun policies continue to work far better than those south of the border.

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