I’m Glad That I Don’t Have Canadian Murder Rates Where I Live
I recently prepared for an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concerning the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. I thought it would be worth my while to compare murder rates between the two countries, but also between adjoining divisions of those two countries. There was a time when Canadian murder rates were low enough compared to the U.S. for American gun-control advocates to argue in favor of Canadian style gun control for our country. This is no longer the case.
It is certainly true that for Canada as a whole, murder rates are still considerably lower than for the United States as a whole. For 2011, Canada had 1.73 homicides per 100,000 people; the United States had 4.8 murders and non-negligent homicides per 100,000 people. What I find fascinating, however, is to look at murder rates for Canadian provinces and compare them to their immediate American state neighbors. When you do that, you discover some very curious differences that show gun availability must be either a very minor factor in determining murder rates, or if it is a major factor, it is overwhelmed by factors that are vastly more important.
For example, I live in Idaho. In 2011, our murder rate was 2.3 per 100,000 people. We have almost no gun-control laws here. You need a permit to carry concealed in cities, but nearly anyone who may legally own a firearm and is over 21 can get that permit. We are subject to the federal background check on firearms, but otherwise there are no restrictions. Do you want a machine gun? And yes, I mean a real machine gun, not a semiautomatic AR-15. There is the federal paperwork required, but the state imposes no licensing of its own. I have friends with completely legal full-automatic Thompson submachine guns.
Surely with such lax gun-control laws, our murder rate must be much higher than our Canadian counterparts’ rate. But this is not the case: I was surprised to find that not only Nunavut (21.01) and the Northwest Territories (6.87) in Canada had much higher murder rates than Idaho, but even Nova Scotia (2.33), Manitoba (4.24), Saskatchewan (3.59), and Alberta (2.88) had higher murder rates. (Okay, Nova Scotia is just a teensy-weensy bit higher than Idaho for 2011.)
What about Minnesota? It had 1.4 murders per 100,000 in 2011, lower than not only all those prairie provinces, but even lower than Canada as a whole. Montana had 2.8 murders per 100,000, still better than for Canadian provinces and one Canadian territory. When you get to North Dakota, another one of these American states with far less gun control than Canada, the murder rate is 3.5 per 100,000, still lower than Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. And let me emphasize that Minnesota, Montana, and North Dakota, like Idaho, are all shall-issue concealed-weapon permit states: nearly any adult without a felony conviction or a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction can obtain a concealed weapon permit with little or no effort.
At this point, you’re going to point out that there are many American states that have very high murder rates, especially in the South, and on the coasts. This is certainly true, but irrelevant to the question of whether gun-control laws reduce murder rates. If gun availability or a lack of restrictive gun-control laws was sufficient to explain any substantial part of murder rates, then these low restriction states should have higher murder rates than their Canadian neighbors, and yet if anything, the situation is the reverse: the Canadian provinces often have higher murder rate than their low gun-control American counterparts.
There are very real social problems that contribute to differences in murder rates. If gun availability is one of those contributors, it must be a very unimportant part of that contribution. Perhaps those focused on gun control as a method of saving lives might be better off concentrating on the social problems that really matter.
Also read: State of the Second Amendment
Another nasty aspect, that isn’t considered is the dissapportionate murder rates among African Americans and hispanics. If you consider all the Countries to which we are compared to have hardly any of the diversity we have. African Americans, who make up about 14% of the population commit more than 50% of the murders. That is a social problem that you won’t see addressed any time soon. And as others on PJ have mentioned, Cities with the strictist gun control have the highest crime rates because only criminals have guns there.
South Africa has strict gun control laws since 1994, but x10 higher murder rates than the US. One would wonder if there is an ethnic-cultural link, but no one wants to go there.
Absolutely correct, but no one wants to go there, the problem continues.
Maybe they should just pass a law forbidding blacks to own hand guns? That should solve everything!
It would help.
It would not. It would just allow the thugs who drive the murder rate anyway totally free reign.
It would probably make the problem in black neighborhoods even worse: criminals don’t need guns to terrorize and murder unarmed victims. There’s a reason that restrictive gun control in Chicago and D.C. has turned these into hellholes.
IIRC, that was pretty much the content and the reasoning behind some of the earliest gun control laws in US history: those passed in the former Confederacy after the late unpleasantness between brothers, which were intended to keep the ex-slave population incapable of self-defense against their revenge-seeking former owner class.
No, my understanding of the post-Reconstruction gun laws was to restrain inherently violence-prone former slaves from taking revenge on their former masters.
One of my many correspondents sent me THIS:
Ban Democrats from owning guns
Make of it what you will.
So go back to the original gun control laws, then?
It would not solve the problem, it would seriously exacerbate it.
The problem of blacks owning handguns is not a function of skin color, so much as it is WHICH blacks have guns. Gun laws disarm honest and law-abiding blacks, just as they do law-abiding whites. This permits criminal blacks to take advantage of their power, and the consequence is a higher black-on-black crime rate, and the suffering of those who want to have a safe and crime-free existence.
Honest and law-abiding citizens, of whatever skin color, want their children and their neighborhoods to be safe. Criminals, of whatever color, will seize the power that having a gun grants to them, and when the honest citizen cannot protect his family, due to government stupidity, they will commit crimes against their neighbors — usually of the same skin color.
Both cultures have a high degree of lawlessness, hate for a significant, identifiable OTHER part of the local population, and nearly non-existent moral foundation.
It’s really not hard to figure out.
With a perpetuated violent sub-culture to boot.
“It’s really not hard to figure out.”
Nope. Of note, the Balkanization of the US through PC claptrap ensures that the rebuplican ideal of “E pluribus unum” is dead.
Interestingly enough, the provinces and territories with a high murder rate in Canada have either an inner city gang war going on between Somali and Jamaican gangs, or have a significant native population who essentially exist,on government handouts.. sound familiar?
Pretty much all of the US states being used for comparison also have substantial Native American populations, that have largely the same problems they do in Canada.
Yep.
Here’s Colby Cosh:
“The answer is that if you account for one obvious cultural difference–the larger black population in the United States–the United States of America’s murder rate is pretty much the same as ours, despite the huge disparity in handgun ownership. Black Americans are 13% of the U.S. population and commit over half of America’s homicides.”
http://www.colbycosh.com/old/november02.html#iaag
Yep – We Canadians are proud of our supposed “better” health care, and “less violent” culture – for no reason…
http://kootenaybob.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/bad-people-kill-people-no-matter-where-they-live/
Take out about 16-19% of the US population and the US has about the lowest crime/murder rates IN THE WORLD…about like Japan. Something like 80% of all violent crime occurs in about 1% of our geographic area. Yet, the victims of those crimes are also the biggest apologists / excuse-making-industry.
I’ve made this very argument with non gun owning liberal. When I bring this up they invariably tell me “well you can’t do that”. To which I ask “Why not”? I’ve yet to get a coherent answer.
You don’t get a coherent answer because the alternative is to ask what cultural factors explain this incredible discrepancy — and the evidence suggests that this is a relatively modern discrepancy.
Please keep posting that exact comment everywhere you can.
Inner city prison yards without fences,a mile from Obama’s house, no southern border to keep out the drug lords,a nation of muted and politically correct lemmings,put on your seat belts this looks like world war 3,and don’t look for it on TV.
Don’t worry, Obama does not live there. He keeps the house for, you know, to appear like one of them. He will keep his resort in Hawaii, a house in Georgetown, another one in NY when he moves out of Govt. housing in a few years.
Lets hope he does move on. I have my doubts.
Right on. This is a very politically-incorrect fact, yet totally relevant. Canada has a lower homicide rate overall, and it has far fewer Negroes per capita that the U.S. The states in the U.S. with the lowest murder rates have the smallest percentage of blacks in their populations.
Racist?
If the shoe fit….
Most of Canadian murders happen in two places. First, it is native reserves where they really resolve their domestic problems with .22LR shot in the head. Second, it is targeted gung-related shootings. For regular folks living in regular places murder is practical impossibility.
Make no mistake. It is no because gun control or luck of it. It is cultural.
Won’t argue with that, because it is the same here. Murder rates are not about guns, they’re about cultures. Gun control won’t fix it. Ever.
I live in the Northern Virginia suburbs of DC. Our murder rate,as well as our violent crime rate, is lower than Toronto which I believe is the the safest big city in Canada. All this despite being a subway ride away from the city with the highest violent crime ratein the US and a car ride away from Maryland which is nearly as bad as DC. Virginia is a shall issue, has constitutional open carry and has a high density of households where guns are present. Crime is ultimately about demographics and not about weapons.
By the way, more people die from the lowly 22LR than from any other caliber.
VA’s Second Amendment rights are also protected by the magnificent VCDL (Virginia Citizens Defense League), probably the most pound-for-pound, dollar-for-dollar effective statewide gun-rights organization to be found anywhere. I get their updates and alerts every day (sometimes twice a day)in my in-box. If some state legislator, mayor, sheriff, police chief, county council-critter, school superintendent, college administrator or gun-hating newspaper or TV-station editor tries to pull a fast one anywhere in the Commonwealth they are on it like a loaded diaper and alerting their membership and telling them the most efficient way to get involved. If there is any gunshow, rally or public hearing going on in the state they make sure their roustabouts know all about it in advance and where to go to be seen and heard.
Any and I mean ANY legislative item that has been proposed or is in the works they make sure the membership knows of its status, whether its good or bad (not always such a simple matter) and what the best course of action is. They are nothing if not proactive and they make no apologies for it (this means STARTING fights as well as finishing them). “Reward our friends and punish our enemies”, remember that one? Well, they live it. They keep careful track of the status of 2nd amendment friends and foes (and lesson number one in pollytics is that few politicos are all-black or all-white on the issues that count) It’s not just “write us a check and get a bumper sticker” with these guys.
Good to know. I will have to renew my VCDL membership – accidentally let it lapse.
When I left Toronto five years ago to move to a suburb of Atlanta, GA, members of my worship congregation, among them one senior man on the governing body of the Ontario bar and another man, a senior civil servant in the provincial equivalent of the Department of Justice, asked me “well, aren’t you afraid of violent crime there?” The answer is avowedly: “NO, I AM NOT.”
Why not?
1. When home owners have guns and are supported by “castle doctrine” and “concealed carry” law, the bad guys are fearful.
2. Its my experience that neighbors are more aware of local crime and suspicious activity in my Atlanta suburb than they were in any place I resided in Southern Ontario and in Greater London, UK.
3. As a life long person involved in real estate brokerage & urban development businesses, I would simply observe that where housing densities are high (for example, NYC or anywhere in the UK, or central Toronto), drug laws are permissive and the fear factor of the bad guys is weak because of restrictive self defense laws, the crime rates are higher than in places where densities are low.
4. In Asian cities with high density living–Hong Kong & Singapore come to mind–there is a much higher level of social control at work of a type that the English speaking mind, educated in the traditions of Magna Carta and the 2nd & 4th Amendments of the US Constitution, wouldn’t readily accept. Additionally, the drug law penalties are draconian.
I leave it to the academicians and theorists to determine if my anecdotal observation is supported by facts derived from statistics.
I agree with you. In Canada, you are even feeling much safer than in US. We have one of the highest immigrant rates in the world and yet I don´t fear living next to brown, yellow or black people.
The author is talking about guns and murders, and compares incomparable. You should compare Chicago and Toronto, as Michael Moore did. Or Vancouver and Seattle. But not Idaho and Alberta or Nunavut.
If Northern Virginia were a Canadian city it would rank 2nd in population and would be the safist city in Canada. Explain why that would be so despite the number of gun owning households.
Michael Moore is a fat idiot who believes whatever Fidel Castro’s minions tell him.
Actually, I am talking about all murders, not just the gun murders.
Alberta and Idaho are actually pretty comparable on many measures; ditto for Minnesota and Manitoba.
Worrying about your neighbors of different colors is pretty silly. Murder in the U.S. is almost entirely within race: black on black, white on white.
How about all those other non-murder crimes, like rape and robbery?
And WHY is Idaho not comparable to its neighbor across the border? I fail to understand.
Interesting post. It would be more illuminating if the author had/has access to information on the actual weapons used in gun crime in Canada. I would not be surprised to find that in Nunavut, where rifles are found in most homes because the men do hunt for food, the rifle is the weapon of choice. In the rest of the nation it probably is a pistol, and it may very well be a .22LR since that is a common target shooting weapon.
If you had comprehended what the author wrote, you might have noticed that he compared MURDER rate to Murder rate. If we compared stabbing murder rates would Canada’s be higher? The UK’s is!
I’d like the author to run the crosstabs on ethnicity and location, as per comment #2, and give us the results and then square those results with his analysis.
I am not in favour of gun control even though, where I live, nobody, and I mean nobody, has a gun or carries one or worries about the issue at all – because that is not our culture.
Your culture, which has a second amendment, produces, for the most part, similarly safe places.
Think of it as an arms race dilemma: if some have guns, all will need them. If some gangs have guns, all gangs will need them. If some natives have guns, all will need them. As with the international arms race, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
That is simply absurd. There is no “arms race.” Quite the opposite.
My possession of a firearm does not mean you need one. Quite the opposite, in fact; if there is trouble, I’ll come to your aid, and, if trouble is anticipated, I have spares that I can loan.
Mind you, I wouldn’t mind an “arms race.” It would be interesting to see what sort of new designs would come out of it. Right now, most firearms are built on designed from 50 to 100 years old. Firearm design is rather stagnant. Where is that advance that makes current weapons look like old percussion rifles or single-shot breech-loaders?
Metal Storm.
Super-imposed loads are almost as old as firearms.
Still, with modern electronics controlling the ignition, it might work.
The main reason firearms development is stagnant is mostly because we haven’t yet figured out a more efficient way of propelling a small piece of lead very fast without smokeless powder that came into use later in the 19th century. Sure we have the tech for magnetic weapons, but they’re quite inefficient right now for small arms due to the need for a lot of power (though the military is testing the idea as a shipboard artillery piece). Once we figure that out, though, we’ll probably see an evolution of firearms as fast as when we figured out the self-contained cartridge. I’m guessing .22 caliber rounds with so much mass fired so fast they can pierce tank armor.
That being said, we’ve probably reached a point where you won’t see firearms evolve cosmetically much anymore. After all, you can take an AR-pattern receiver and put literally *any* system onto it, from black powder to bolt-action to select-fire. One day I’m sure someone, commercial or amateur, will make a coilgun attachment for an AR that won’t look any different than the standard except a thicker barrel and an attached power source.
A polite question: What do you do if two large 19-year-olds break into your house and tell you they are going to beat the hell out of you if you don’t give them your car keys and money, you give them the keys and money, and they say they’re going to beat the hell out of you anyway, just for fun?
I believe in Baltimore City, in spit eo fstate law, you are supposed to jump out the window, Really.
Canadian and British law have what you are talking about….A DUTY TO RETREAT.
Additionally since the concept of “freedom of speech” is really not ingrained in both those countries, prosecutors often apply for, and are granted, “do not publish” orders, or worse, a closed courtroom, so the general public never finds out what really is going on.
I suppose you only need to call the police before you jump so they can be there to catch you from your third story window? I’ll rely on Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson thank you.
Sometimes helpful hints are not helpful at all…
This reminds me of the fashionable progressive article of faith in the 1920′s-1930′s pop-culture–that arms races gave rise to political rivalries and national hostilities rather than the other way around and that those eeeevil arms dealers secretly manipulated hapless politicians and generals and started wars around the world so they could sell their wares to both sides…
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc. Because one person buys a gun, others will need to as well. This is logical fallacy, unless you would like to cite some sociological studies validating it. I’m not aware of such, but maybe you know?
More to the point: States with the lowest gun ownership have the highest homicide rates. So gun ownership and murder don’t correlate.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/gun-control-fails-say-statistics-from-gun-control-advocates/?singlepage=true
The obvious you state and mostly to the choir. Then again, the truth can not be stated too often.
Peaceful people don’t generally need guns, nor are they necessarily a problem if they have them, as places like Minnesota and Idaho demonstrate. Of course, if you are inclined to not being peaceful, you can do a lot of damage with knives.
More interested in the top 100 murder rates per city or neighborhood {something useful}. We deserve to know those numbers since we like to travel around.More interested in the lists that don’t get published,but that’s probably racist too!
Logic has nothing to do with the gun control issue.
fred-m, I disagree. I think the people who are trying to force gun control through on us have very definite goals, and are pursuing them in a very carefully thought out manner. If you want to disarm the citizenry, it’s logical to blame events like Newtown on gun ownership, rather than mental health diagnoses. It’s logical to cloud the language up to enact progressively more restrictive bans on weaponry. Its logical to make emotional appeals to people ruled by emotions rather than intellect.
The people who want to disarm the population are contemptible and evil. Their goals are stupid and would likely result in them losing the rest of their rights. That doesn’t mean they are too stupid to form structured plans to achieve their short term goal of gun confiscation.
No one has investigated what sort of prescription drugs our “school shooters” have been on. There is a factor with anti-depressants of a “rebound” effect when the individual fails to take his prescribed drug as recommended. I have witnessed this “rebound effect” personally, and was thankful that the individual in question did not have access to firearms at the time.
It’s been researched. If you google around, there’s been a list going around since Newtown, of 30 or 40 mass shooters and which drugs they’ve been taking. Prescription drugs have played a role in effectively ALL mass shootings. Yet, the pharma companies are still allowed to prescribe these particular drugs to young men, even though they are well aware that the drugs can cause violent behavior, including homicidal rampages.
In many of these cases, yes, but keep in mind that most mass murderers have histories of mental illness. The drugs are often prescribed in the hopes of helping such persons; are you seeing an causal relationship, or are the drugs failing in these cases?
Then the solution is to register all who use particular drugs – and put a tracking collar on them.
Very true, Mitchell.
History shows us that tyrants, in order to gain absolute control, always disarm the citizenry.
More precisely, the arguments depend on the targets of the arguments being incapable of logic, or lacking in knowledge.
No one here can say poop even if they have a mouthful? White America does not have a murder problem.
Interesting data!
I recall reading some time ago that Japan has very low murder rates and tight gun control. Japanese companies even began making very accurate fake guns so that collectors could own them, since there is not other way they could.
Of course that did not prevent the Japanese Red Army from using fully automatic weapons to shoot up an airport and murder innocent travelers some decades back.
And if you look at the murder rate for Japanese that have gone to live in the USA, you find it is lower than in Japan.
I wonder though, what are the Canadian and Japanese attitudes toward serious mental illness? Are they as concerned with protecting the civil rights of the insane rather than the general public being protected from the insane?
Also regarding Japan – they have a far higher suicide rate than the US. So much for the oft repeated trope that “If only X hadn’t had easy access to a gun, he’d be alive today.”
As for availability of guns, Switzerland is third in the world (and we’re talking about actual military issue select fire assault rifles in the closets) and a much lower rate of violent crime than the US. Obviously the “gun culture” is not a major determining factor.
Could the presence of a military rifle in every Swiss closet have anything to do with Switzerland being the only nation in Continental Europe not to have been invaded by another nation since the time of Napoleon?
Japan’s suicide rate is 50% greater than our murder + suicide rate. Many people attribute that to the Japanese honor culture and that would be correct. However, part of that honor culture is to protect the family from the shame of having to acknowledge that a family member killed everybody in the household. It suspected that many family murders are classified as a family or mass suicide when in fact it is actually a murder-suicide. It is quite possible that real Japanese murder rate is as high as or even higher than that found in the US.
On another note, I don’t understand why gun control advocates always talk about the number of gun suicides. Most Progressives are pro-choice when comes to abortion or euthanasia. Suicide is also a personal choice that doesn’t involve a third party doing the dirty work. Perhaps they are only pro-choice when somebody else gets to do the killing. I suspect their objections to suicide are based on the individual’s usurpation of the government’s right to determine who get to live or die.
They talk about suicides because this triples the number or deaths, serving their agenda. Truth and logical consistency have nothing to do with it. They also ignore lives saved with guns, crimes prevented with guns, non-firearm suicides in other countries like Japan, countries with strict gun control and high crime rates, mass murders committed without firearms, etc. etc. How much press is the guy in Guam getting? He killed 3 people and injured many others with his (very small) car and a couple of knives. It’s all about their self-image, magical thinking, a desire to control everybody else, or some combination thereof (depending on the “progressive”).
Nice answer to a rhetorical question
Don Kates wrote about Japan’s suicide rate and how they refer to “family suicides” instead of family murder-suicides years and years ago in an regular column he had in one of the monthly gun magazines, I think it was the magazine “Handguns”. Notice the Liberals in government and media repeat the same garbage on gun control that has been refuted years ago. Thomas Sowell had an essay about how the Libtards keep doing that.
“the government’s right to determine who get to live or die”
They object to the death penalty too.
Their “logic” is only the most innocent should be killed.
Governments, including that of the United States of America, have an attitude of “owning” their citizens in much the same way that Kings in earlier history considered those whom they ruled as “subjects. Suicide is thus considered a form of “rebellion” against the “State”. Consider the attitude of most national governments about people indulging in “self destructive activities” such as smoking cigarettes. Now a cigarette smoker has a shorter lifespan than does a non-smoker. They will collect retirement benefits for a shorter period of time such as Social Security. They in effect “cost less” than does the person who takes good care of his or her health and lives to a ripe old age. (often spending their last years in a nursing home) So in effect non-smokers end up costing us taxpayers “more” than smokers do!
I’d be interested to see the Mexican murder rate and how it compares to south border states. Maybe it is related to culture which seems to have some relation to climate. (North usually more industrious than south.)
Victim disarmament and political corruption play big roles in the horrible Mexican murder rate. They darn near have multiple civil wars going.
Good point. Mexico has extremely harsh, restrictive and punitive gun laws, as many an unwary American citizen has discovered to his distress upon crossing the southern border. Have those laws curbed gun violence? (In a culture where the criminals often wear uniforms and badges).
I recently looked up the CDC numbers on causes of death in the US. The latest figures I could find were for 2009. There were 16,700 homicides that year. The homicide rate for blacks was 5.4 times that of whites. That means that there 2,000 white homicides and 14,700 black homicides. If the black homicide rate, 34/100,000 dropped to the white rate 1/100,000 there would only have been 2,200 murders that year. That’s 14,500 extra murders in the black community. Two weeks on the Cicago Southside is the equal of Newtown, but it’s only black kids, and they all vote Dem anyway, and it’s racist to bring it up.
And this last time they voted as many times as fakery allowed it.
1996 FBI homicide stats for African-Americans:
9-10 X Likely to be murdered compared to white counterparts
10 out of 11 perps will be another African-American
1996 rape stats for African-Americans:
8-10 X Likely to be raped compared to white counterparts
9 out of 11 perps will be another African-American
Something is very disturbing about the above stats.
Great thing about moral relativism, this disparity is cancelled out because you can give just one example by a white-on-white murder and viola, “People are all alike”
Also: If People are to be considered as a form of (human) capitol, this horrendous murder rate is actually a form of a NEGATIVE compound interest. And as we all know the general American public is ignorant of the power of this same compound interest.
What would be the result of 10-20 years of a negative compound interest ?
Don’t be mathematically illiterate.
The murder rate for blacks is 5.4 times the rate for whites, not the number.
There are about 6 times as many whites as blacks. (Blacks are about 13%, Latinos, Asians, and American Indians about 13%, and whites are the remaining 74%.)
Thus black murders are about equal to white murders. That’s bad enough.
According to Statistics Canada, in 2011 there were 598 homicides in the whole country. They broke down by method as follows:
Stabbings – 35.4% (204)
Shootings – 27.4% (158)
Beatings – 21.7% (125)
Strangulation/Suffocation – 6.9% (40)
Fire – 3.6% (21)
Vehicular – 2.6% (15)
Shaken Baby Syndrome – 0.7% (4)
Poisoning – 0.5% (3)
Other – 1.2% (7)
What’s interesting is how the shooting homicide statistics break down. Again, from Statscan in 2011:
Handgun – 65.7% (94)
Rifle/Shotgun – 21% (30)
Sawed-off rifle or shotgun – 10.5% (15)
Fully automatic firearm – 1.4% (2)
Firearm-like weapons – 1.4% (2)
Unknown – (15)
In short, in Canada:
- you are far more likely to be stabbed to death than shot;
- you are far more likely to be beaten to death than shot with a handgun;
- you are far more likely to be strangled or suffocated than shot with a rifle or shotgun
And you are three times as likely to be killed by a family member, a friend or an acquaintance as by a complete stranger. That’s probably because we all know each other up here anyway, eh?
Most of the firearm homicides in Canada are committed with a handgun, despite handguns being tightly controlled since the 1930s; and according to police reports, 44% of firearm homicides are gang-related. So if somebody shoots you in Canada, chances are it will be with an illegal handgun. But on the up side, chances are it’ll be somebody you know.
Or maybe it’s just the weather. As Pierre Berton wrote in his treatise “Why We Act like Canadians”, America’s “mythic encounters seem to have taken place at high noon, the Sun beating down on a dusty Arizona street. I find it difficult to contemplate a similar gunfight in Moose Jaw in the winter, the bitter rivals struggling to shed two pairs of mitts and reach under several layers of parka for weapons so cold that the slightest touch of flesh on steel would take the skin off their thumbs.”
Temperature and humidity are both significant factors in murder rates, and without question, Canada benefits from this. That’s part of why I think comparing neighboring provinces and states is a more useful exercise. I am looking forward to go to northern Saskatchewan one of these days for the aurora borealis — but if any Canadians ask me about what it is liking visiting their peaceful country, I’ll have to tell them, “Compared to Idaho, this is a murder mad province!”
“family member, a friend or an acquaintance”
A very deceptive grouping.
“Worst enemies” are most likely to be acquainted, yet they are lumped together with “friends”?
Philip, it gets even worse than this.
I’m in Chicago and a local paper, The Sun Times, went into detail on the current murder spree on the South Side.
Based on research/forensics by the CPD, turns out Social Media seems to play a role in a bunch of cases.
IOW, Facebook is enabling murders, robberies, flash-mob robberies, general boasting/publicizing of crime, etc.
I don’t think that the pioneers of Social Media or anyone anticipated this!
If pravda cited statistics for gun violence for US inner cities vs the rest of the country, the real problem would be crystal clear. Black / Hispanic / other statistics would be even more clear.
But that doesn’t fit the gun confiscation agenda (nor the new Orwellian agenda of asserting blacks as a superior form of humanity), so they never will.
New York and Michigan both border on Canada, and have much higher murder rates than Canada … but that’s just to be sarcastic, your point is well taken.
I wonder what the stats would be for Michigan and New York State if the cities of Detroit and New York were removed. Bet they drop like a rock to national averages.
Likely true; cities usually have much higher murder rates than rural areas. Although there are many years here in Idaho where the reverse is true.
How about we don’t have the population that you guys do. I person murdered in Nunavut is going to not be 1 in a 100,000 but 1 in 34,000. Plus we have the added factors of no sun in the winter bringing on depression and a 85% of the population is Inuit who are hunters. Nunavut is not a good example at all.
The point of stating these statistics in events per unit population is so you can make comparisons between localities of different sizes. I guess they don’t teach you Canucks much about statistics. (Before indignation sets in my mother hails from the Fort Qu’Appelle region of Saskatchewan.)
I recently read article in the Toronto Globe and Mail that compared homicide rates in various Canadian urban areas. You would be surprised to find out that places like Halifax, Regina and Winnipeg have similar homicides to average American cities. Canadian murders are not concentrated in First Nation reservations and homelands.
Ever notice that there are always important cultural reasons for patterns of violence everywhere else, but in the USA, it’s always and only about easy access to weapons?
You will notice that I mention Nunavut, but most of the article is comparing the prairie provinces with their American neighbors.
Not to mention carbon monoxide, alcohol, and lack of ability to gain personal space to cool off without losing body parts to freezing.
The problem here in the USA as regards crime is , has been and always will be BLACKS. You can dance with the statistics forever, just can’t escape the reality of a fraction of the population as a whole causing such social chaos. Exceptions, yes, but few.
Blacks currently. Previous violent ethnic groups include Irish, Italians, Mexicans, English, French, who knows who else? Chinese and Japanese are about the only exceptions.
Depends on the era.
There was a time in California when Chinese were also in the violent groups. Hint: huge numbers of unmarried Chinese men. Unmarried and especially young unmarried men are a problem in just about every group.
“DN” left out an important statistic for Canada…deaths from sheer boredom! After all, it’s Canada…eh?
Boredom? In Canada? I don’t think so.
You didn’t mention or break down those murder rates by the weapons used. So I was wondering if Canadian murder rates reflected less gun homicides and more killings by knives and clubs? There seems to be a tacit assumption among gun control advocates that getting butchered by a Bowie knife is more humane than getting holed by a Colt Peace Maker.
Guns are certainly more lethal than knives, but I think there is a mistaken belief in some circles that you can outrun a guy with a knife.
pretty weak sauce
the article omits michigan, illinois and new york state, which have much higher murder rates than the provinces they border on, but includes nunavit and the northwest territories which are a long way from idaho. in fact, nunavit is further away from idaho than any part of the continental us or, for that matter, most of the caribbean. how about comparing the jamaican murder rate to idaho’s while we are at it?
the short answer to the article is that there is no part of any canadian city i’d be afraid to walk around in alone at 2am on a saturday night. that’s the telling difference between the countries. once you filter out of the crime stats all the violence between people who know one another, the stats in canada for violent crimes against strangers are extremely low, but many places in the us are not safe. whether or not it has anything to do with gun control is another matter and could be the subject of a good article that could be posted in place of this piece of dreck.
New York, Michigan and Illinois are demographically different than their Canadian equivalent. Idaho, The Dakotas, Minnesota and Montana are demographically similar to Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. You compare similar entities to factor out differing demographics.
I could just as well have included Nova Scotia vs. Maine. Nunavut is a tiny part of the article — it is mostly comparing similar prairie provinces to their American counterparts.
is there some actual analysis here or are you spit-balling? it certainly sounds like you are cherry picking, that you don’t know much about canada and are assuming similarities that do not exist.
let’s start with your alberta/sk/manitoba to idaho comparison.
first off, idaho actually borders on bc but you ignored bc because it has a low rate. i’ll come back to that.
alberta first – calgary has over a million people and edmonton has over 800,000, which between them equals more than 50% of the population of alberta living in large urban areas. boise has 350,000 people if you factor in the burbs or about 30% of idahoans living in a much smaller city. i don’t see a legitimate demographic comparison there. and then there is the native population: 6% in alberta and 1.6% in idaho. even if you factored out the wild west of the oil sands and the problems on first nation reserves in alberta i do not think you get to a legitimate demographic comparison.
what about saskatchewan? closer to idaho in terms of city size but still 50% of the population is urban with regina and saskatoon both over 200,000. more importantly, it has a 16% native population and huge problems in rural reserves.
manitoba is 15% native and winnipeg has over 700,000 people representing 60% of its population.
let’s go back to bc: it has a murder rate of 1.8 and a nearly 75% urban population and 5% aboriginal population. that murder rate is lower than idaho or washington state at 2.4.
we could speculate all day long about the various drivers for these rates. my point is that your article provides no convincing arguments for drawing any legitimate correlations at all, much less as a basis to refute the effectiveness of gun control in canada (which i do not support).
To all the Canucks replying here:
I suggest the operative factor is not merely amount of population, but POPULATION DENSITY. Where densities are lower, there is less unwanted rubbing of the shoulders with people that you just can’t stand.
Starting with Trudeau, federal government transfers under equalization (that’s money collected by the feds, put in a kettle and then doled out to various states / provinces for my fellow Americans) tied provinces to land development policies which originated in the brainiac offices of CMHC (Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, think Freddie Mae and Fanny Mac but with effective influence over all residential building in the country). These policies of increasing density were passed down to cities, towns and counties via respective provincial Planning Acts.
In Ontario, where I put in 29 years in real estate sales and land development businesses, these policies first started in the Peterson Liberal government under the tenure of Chaviva Hosek Ph. D., former professor of English Lit. who knows Zilch about housing but went on to be a political strategist in the office of Prime Minister Jean Chretien during his 13 year tenure in that office.
In American terms, that explains why 50% of the Canadian population lives in only three cities: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, as opposed to the US model where 50% live in towns of 100,000 to 500,000. It meant that effectively a town might allow a subdivision of US$1 million homes and right next to it, Section 8 housing. And the folks LOVE IT, under the name of “fairness”.
Needless to say, most of those folks are unarmed, but some types have no trouble getting illegal firearms.
1. These are the policies being touted in CA and the North East as “smart growth” under the same sort of pseudo-enviromental justification.
2. Needless to say, “safety and security” becomes someone else’s job, the nameless one looking through the lens of the CCTV cams, rather than the neighborhood self help that I experience in my gun toting NE Atlanta suburb.
3. As an anecdote, I note that my 1960′s lot in a town 60 miles from Toronto is 1/8th of an acre. I note that my 1950′s lot in Atlanta is 3/4ths of an acre,and the values are similar. Even mid 20th C, the civil service savants who tell Canucks what is best for them, were reluctant to buy into the idea that suburbia leads to privacy and privacy leads to unrestrained individualism and that IS A GOOD THING.
first off there are 34.5 million canadians. 6 million live in toronto gta, 3.8m in metro montreal, and 2.3m in metro vancouver, or 12.1 million, or 35%, not 50%
and are you seriously recommending atlanta over vancouver as a model of urban planning or as a safer place to live? put down the crack pipe.
i’m no fan of urban densification, but i’m no fan of urban sprawl either. the solution to urban planning is for people to stop moving to cities.
BC’s rate is low these days, but in the 90s we had issues with gang warfare in Vancouver driving the rate up. Which at various points did include white biker gangs, just like Quebec deals with from time to time, but usually had something to do with ethnic gangs who seem to have mostly killed each other off or landed in jail.
BC’s homicide rate has been steadily dropping for the last couple years, which is hopefully a good sign but maybe it’s just an anomaly.
the number of murders across canada are so low that they can fluctuate significantly in a region year to year based on single events. chicago (506) has nearly as many murders as the entire country (598). nunavut’s current crazy high rate is based on 7 murders. it could easily drop to zero which is the rate in the yukon which has very similar demographics.
the case for gun rights making a politer safer society is a tricky one to make, especially given the us murder rate. i don’t think this kind of poorly reasoned story helps that cause a bit.
Though finding this article interesting, I find it rather shallow as those “MURDER” statistics need to be broken down into those involving a gun USED to murder someone vs knives, bats, machete’s etc.
E.G. Just this morning 2 young (15 & 16)females from Tswassen were in a knife fight, one is dead so far. The other not far behind according to the CBC…
Lets compare apples to apples, dig deeper than the surface.
ps I am not in support of our rights-robbing GC legislation either..
Also I believe that CC is a great deterrent vs NO Carry zones
Washington State has a large black population; BC doesn’t. That alone is part of why BC is so much safer.
If you read the article, you would see that I made the point that if gun control makes the prairie provinces safer, it must be pretty small compared to some other factor that is clearly more important. You have identified one possible factor that matters a lot more: urbanization.
“the short answer to the article is that there is no part of any canadian city i’d be afraid to walk around in alone at 2am on a saturday night.”
Massive quantities of solidified horse effluvia….
I was raised by the boarder in Washington State. Used to go up to Vancouver all the time. I can think of SEVERAL areas in Vancouver that you would have to be absolutely brain-dead to attempt that trick.
Erk… border, not “boarder”
Trapped indoors by snow for nine months, while Justin Bieber’s music annoys in the background.
It’s a wonder the Canadian crime rate isn’t higher.
And the straw that breaks the Camel’s back ?
“What?, No more Maple Syrup ?!
“Dec 19, 2012 … The police in Quebec arrested three men in connection with the theft of six million pounds of syrup from Canada’s global strategic maple syrup …”
Let the Rampage begin!
Back to the crazy aunt in the attic whom no one wants to discuss. The US murder stats can be refined further. Blacks are roughly 12% of the US population. CDC and DOJ stats show that blacks commit roughly 50% of all US murders (75% of these being black-on-black). The primary subset of these murders are committed by black males, who comprise roughly 6% of the US population. Refined further, the key subset of this group — males between 18-35 years of age — are roughly 2% of the US population, but commit the vast majority of the black-authored murders, i.e., 40% of the 50% of total murders committed by blacks — or 80%.
In short, a measly 2% of the US population commits over 40% of all murders in the US. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out the appropriate message — “NAACP, we’ve got a problem.”
Added to this carnage is the fact that 40% of all abortions are committed on blacks, which, again, are roughly 12% of the US population. In sum, blacks are waging war on themselves — committing cultural and ethnic fratricide, mostly as a result of disastrous liberal/socialist Democrat policies that have ghettoed blacks into urban prisons from which most can’t escape.
Nonetheless, the Democrat party and the black establishment continue to blame Whitey for their problems. And demography statisticians wonder why the black percentage of the US population has been stagnant at 12% for about a century!
It’s a natural Darwinian process, really.
At some point this same population will have outgrown this insane, murderous phase,
but not w/o much collateral damage.
I understand that the Irish-Americans went thru a similar process, earlier this century. All their criminal anti-social types ended up dead, in prison, or reformed. Think of all those James Cagney files; reflection of the times back then.
Russian Jewish immigrants had a similar process in their community around the turn of the century into Prohibition until the immigration statute of the 1920′s and the Red Scare closed the gates to them.
Surely, abortion on demand will make the genetic line of some folks with the most profligate attitude towards common sense and basic morality self extinguishing, if HIV-AIDS doesn’t do it first.
So your point is that adjacency to the US breeds violence? Interesting theory.
???
If that were the case, then you would expect the prairie provinces to have lower murder rates than the corresponding U.S. states.
Of course, Nunavut, the worst of all, isn’t adjacent to any American state.
So where are the stats for Ontario and Quebec? These are the most populous Canadian provinces, and they border the US.
Follow the links. They are lower than some of their U.S. neighbors (like New York) but higher than others (like Vermont and New Hampshire).
Quote: “Worrying about your neighbors of different colors is pretty silly. Murder in the U.S. is almost entirely within race: black on black, white on white.”
That is because most American whites are smart enough to live as far away from blacks as possible. If our neighborhoods were as diverse as liberals would like then we would have much higher rates of whites being murdered by blacks.
Quote: “I understand that the Irish-Americans went thru a similar process, earlier this century. All their criminal anti-social types ended up dead, in prison, or reformed. Think of all those James Cagney files; reflection of the times back then.”
Blacks have been engaging in criminal violence for centuries. The Irish parts of Boston and New York never got as bad as places such as Detroit, Compton or Newark. One major difference between the Irish and the blacks is that liberals were not trying to justify Irish crime rates by blaming anti-Irish racism.
Also, black have the problem of being identified as part of a specific group on sight. This enabled racism, and has also enabled blacks to pressure other blacks to “behave black” (“oreo” or “uncle Tom”). Basically, this has made it more difficult for blacks to become part of the wider culture. This isn’t a complete answer, but it is part of it.
IIRC, the US white murder rate is 2.5/100k, black is 17/100k.
This is interesting. In the 90s when I first was introduced to the web I found a grad student web site where he went though similar comparisons. The basic conclusion seemed to be that there wasn’t much difference between the US and Canada, except in certain large cities that really did not have reasonable comparisons.
And yes, the Canadian native population is part of the Canadian homicide problem. This is a cultural problem, not a gun problem.
Correct.
Talking about a connection between crime and race/culture is “that which cannot be spoken”.
I find it somewhat amusing that the Left in CO is clamoring for the imposition of CA/NY style restrictions on firearms, completely disregarding the murder rates in those two states compared to CO:
The latest crime stats (2011) show that CO has a murder rate of 2.9; compared to NY’s 4.0, and CA’s 4.8.
Is that really where you want to go Colorado?
Cuba’s murder rate is 6 per 100,000.
They have total gun control.
And lot’s of really cool images of Che Guevara.
So that America has a lower rate is, well, something best not talked about.
jDoes the Cuban murder rate include all those dissidents murdered by Castro’s KGB?
Despite the excuses, including Nunavut, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories in a comparison is simply invalid. The murder rates there can easily leap wildly as statistical anomalies due to their low population. Indeed look at Yukon, with a population higher than Nunavut and a murder rate of . . . 0.
Even Nova Scotia, with a population of just under 1 million, is an unreliable data point when we realize it has “suffered” from an “explosion” of murder in the last two years, with the murder rate “leaping” from 1.39 in 2007, 1.28 in 2008, and 1.60 in 2009, to a staggering 2.22 in 2010, and 2.33 in 2011. Which of course means it went from 13 to 12 to 15 to 21 to 22 people actually murdered in those years respectively. And that of course disqualifies New Brunswick (750K pop.), Newfoundland and Labrador (500K pop.), and Prince Edward Island (140K pop.) from being particularly useful data references either.
Meanwhile, even comparing Idaho with those provinces produces some quirks, as I note that Idaho itself is suffering from an “explosion of murder”, with the rate surging 50% in 2011 compared to 2010, while the 2010 rate was less than half that of the 2007 rate. Of course the rate in Alberta also jumped by 33%, so it is difficult to tell.
Oh wait, the difference in Idaho is from 22 in 2010 to 36 in 2011, while the change in Alberta is from 77 to 109, which is comparable to the 109 in 2008 but not the 88 in 2007.
Ultimately, when dealing with any sample area that is 10-25 reference units in size, the immediate year to year variation is going to vary way too wildly to be particularly useful in isolation, and you instead need to look at multi-year trends for anything significant.
Likewise when looking at particular groupings and comparing heavily dispersed to heavily concentrated areas you need to be prepared to vary your sampling. NYC is a prime example that I am constantly pointing out to people, with a population that would make it the 12th most populous state (just edging out Virginia), but also being five counties, and once upon a time numerous villages and towns, which now have wildly varying crime rates.
Yes. You are right as it stands.
Add in Hamilton Wentworth Niagara, Calgary and Edmonton, Winnipeg and it comes to about 50% of Canada’s population.
In my 1993 “Le droit de porter des armes” (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, pp. 168-171), I quoted similar figures from Brandon Centerwall’s famous 1991 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
I am glad to see someone else pick up on this.
I purchased data from Stats Canada for all our western provinces and compared that to a number of the closest U.S. States. I obtained data for several recent years and took averages for each state/province to avoid anomalies.
The results were as you found – Canadians have been taught that theirs is a safer country than the U.S., but it turns out on close examination that is only true for the 6 largest cities in the U.S. Other than that, it is a myth.
In fact, looked at over 5 years, my data showed Minnesota had a lower murder rate than any of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Montana’s 5-yr. average was 1.9 per 100k. Alberta’s was 2.9.
There’s a lot they don’t tell us; on either side of the border. We get emotion, propaganda and selected data. Whatever name on might assign to that mixture, “truth” is not among them.
Pp
Canada has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world! And you looked at the very worst crime rates in Canada and compared them with your best! our crime rates are way lower then yours and we still have lots of guns. Only difference is we restrict who can own guns and what kind of guns. I like guns America has a problem with guns it’s not the guns fault it’s how your handling your guns something needs to be fixed. Why is it such a big deal to have a magazine that holds more then 20 rounds anyway if someone’s breaking into your house you should only need one. A few restrictions couldn’t hurt
“if someone’s breaking into your house you should only need one”
What if five someones are breaking into your house, and they are wearing body armor?
Another point that actually hurts my point most of those provinces and territory’s have high registerd gun owners so per capita those places have the most guns and even though Ontario and Quebec have the highest populations ( big cities for people to rub shoulders). not a lot of them own guns and they’re crime rates weren’t mention in this article. I guess giving people guns does make it easier for them to kill each other.
“Perhaps those focused on gun control as a method of saving lives might be better off concentrating on the social problems that really matter.”
Focusing on social factors might uncover information that would offend this or that group so even attempting such research would not be politically correct.
Canada is also a lot more dense than america. Those states mentioned would add up to about one province in Canada. If Canada’s provincial borders were smaller and we had more of them, then it would be more in proportion. But a state by state analysis is not a true comparison.