Megapundit Extra: But think of the symbolic value…

“Make them harder to get, they get more expensive.”

T Thwim I agree with you wrote there but I don’t think your next thought is correct.

Obviously, there is demand for guns in Toronto and other major cities, and I find criminals are quite good capitalists so I believe cities will be flooded with guns from U.S. if prices start to rise.

That would be the case if the rise in price came from increased demand, but the rise in price would come from a more difficult supply. Suppliers, even illegal ones, aren’t going to take on more risk without more reward, and I presume the prices are where they are now because thats where the suppliers have judged they get decent returns based on the risks.

To assume that the market would flood if the risks went up assumes that for some reason the gun runners are holding back now while the risk is lower.

The text of the petition rebuts itself. One-third of the guns used by criminals are stolen from sources the petition wants to eliminate. I suppose there is data to back that up, so fine.
The author of the petition is not smarter than a 5th grader, however, because a 5th grader would say “Hey, that leaves two-thirds, and that’s more than one third!”
The esoteric debate about supply and demand that follows in the comments is cute, but I feel it misses the point: Making it ever-so-slightly harder to obtain an illegal weapon in order to commit a crime comes at a high price to individual freedom while only having an infintessimally marginal impact on the criminal activity itself. Why won’t we have enough of a debate on the investigation and prosecution and punishment of the criminals themselves?
Used a firearm to intentionally commit a crime? Found guilty? Sentence tripled, no parole, maximum security prison. Alternate choice: you’re now a dangerous offender like a pedophile, and you’re out of circulation for good. That way, while the economists calculate the 0.6% price increase of a back-alley gun purchase and the social workers can talk in polite hushed tones about absent fathers, the corrections officers can actually accomplish something.

The high price to individual freedom is preventing the average citizen from having easy access to handguns. I dunno. Doesn’t seem like that high a price to me.

I assume you’re also terribly upset about people not being allowed to possess RPGs, anti-tank weaponry, and mortars?

Please. We live in a society where we compromise. We each agree to give up some aspects of our personal freedom in order to make life livable without having to constantly worry about our security or personal property. That’s what every law is.

I see the illogical urban voter/citizen sees only what they want to see.

I live in an area where the biggest threat to humans is not a street thug, I’m talking about very large and sometimes dangerous predators such as bears and cougars. I know personally many people that have a LEGAL right to carry handguns, including wildlife biologists and helicopter pilots, that need the sidearm for personal protection from these predators. Because handguns are considered a danger to URBAN people, why do we not consider a ban( like it would really make a difference in the slightest anyway) on URBAN gun ownership as opposed to a national one?? Why do urban people insist on forcing their agenda on the rest of us? Who the hell do they think they are anyway? What is good for them is not good for me. I would hope those urban jackasses could open their minds to the concept that there are uses for things like firearms than just committing crimes.

Where rural people live, guns of all kinds are considered TOOLS, not weapons to hurt people. There seems to be a disconnect in simple logic with anti-gun people. All the laws and regulations regarding gun control are only affecting the legal, law abiding gun owners. Criminals simple don’t care what the laws are, they break those laws with nary a consideration. Keep in mind, people, murder and theft is illegal isn’t it? That hasn’t stopped the senseless killing in the streets of our major cities in the slightest. What the gun control laws have accomplished, if anything at all, is to deprive the law abiding citizen the means to defend themselves.

There current laws demand that all firearms be locked securely in a safe, with trigger locks installed. There are steep penalties for those who don’t store their weapons in such a manner… added to that, you can’t even buy ammunition for Dad’s old hunting rifle without a permit. Do people really think that forcing hunters and target shooters to jump through these hoops stops a gang-banger from killing another gang-banger? Give your urban heads a shake! The only way to stop this violence is to imprison the criminals for a very long time. When the ‘cost of doing business’ for thugs is a minimum 10 year stretch in a very ugly prison where they are raped by their cell mate, will they consider the alternative.

Telling a rancher in Alberta or a wildlife biologist in Yukon that he has to give up an important self defense tool because thugs in Toronto are killing each other makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Learn to think with your heads instead of knee-jerk, simplistic over-reaction. They don’t ban cars just because there is a car accident, do they?
DUH!

“Now you do not keep a little boy from throwing stones by preventing him from ever seeing stones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones in the Geological Museum, and only issuing tickets of admission to adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the beach, for fear he should practice throwing them into the sea. You do not even adopt so obvious and even pressing a social reform as forbidding roads to be made of anything but asphalt, or directing that all gardens shall be made on clay and none on gravel. You neglect all these great opportunities opening before you; you neglect all these inspiring vistas of social science and enlightenment. When you want to prevent a child from throwing stones, you fall back on the stalest and most sentimental and even most superstitious methods. You do it by trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the child. You trust to your private relation with the boy, and not to your public relation with the stone.”

GK Chesterton, “The Terror of a Toy”

Count: If handguns are illegal on the general street, then it is easier to prevent their entry into the country in the first place, because you don’t have general buyers and sellers looking to meet unspecified demand. That’s the difference between making it illegal and just insisting that the storage laws (which I believe we already have) be fully enforced, unfortunately. If we want to see a drop in criminal gun ownership we have to make the price increase. The best way to do that is to be able to stop them at the borders whenever possible.

EMG: Going by that logic, again you fall down the slippery slope of “Well why aren’t RPGs, mortars, and biological weapons legal? After all, if we don’t want people to use them, all we need do is sternly tell them not to.”

Arctic front: You raise a good point, which is why it’s important to remember that this is about a handgun ban, not a rifle ban. I’m quite comfortable with allowing rifles in rural Canada. This means that I have to accept them in urban Canada, which is fine. A non-automatica rifle generally isn’t a tool of random violence, nor of gang violence. Carrying one around will generally put people on the alert, and that’s good enough. Easily concealable handguns, however, are a different thing.

The argument that criminals don’t care what the laws are is a red-herring. Criminals care about the availability. When hanguns are harder to get simply because there’s fewer of them coming into the country, they become less available and more expensive. I don’t care what kind of criminal it is, when criminals are unable to find handguns in private residences or public stores, and when the price of guns goes up because there are fewer of them available in general, you’re going to find fewer handguns in the pockets of criminals.

re. T. Thwim’s (unintentionally?) cynical “If we want to see a drop in criminal gun ownership we have to make the price increase.”

1) Criminals (with one notable recent exception) don’t “own” guns–not in the legal sense.

2) Is this what we want to see a drop in? Is this David Miller’s stated goal of a handgun ban? That seems rather pointless, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t the idea, rather, that “a drop in criminal gun ownership” will lead to a reduction in criminals, or anyway, crime? I’ll ask you to see how effective such reasoning turned out to be in England, where there has been a massive increase in gun crime since the 1997 ban.

Incidentally, you lost me with the rpg/mortars and biological weapons example. As I understand it, the last is banned by international convention, the first are highly restricted use weapons. Handguns are already of the latter category–if lower down the list (for obvious reasons).

EMG:

1. They don’t get them for free either. They either have to steal them from somewhere, or purchase them from someone. If handguns are rarer, they’re harder to steal. If they’re rarer, purchasing them (whether from a legit owner or not) is going to be more costly. Simple supply and demand, unless you feel that doesn’t apply to criminals for some reason.

2. I have no clue whether it’s David Miller’s stated goal or not. It’s pretty obvious that a reduction in criminal handgun ownership won’t magically make fewer criminals or fewer crimes, but hopefully what it will cause is a reduction in the number of fatalities associated with crime.

3. If I lost you, might I suggest you re-read your little screed by Mr. Chesterton. He’s essentially saying that we shouldn’t regulate the possession of anything, but rather all we need to do is properly educate our citizens in their responsible use. It’s a lovely sentiment, and if it wasn’t for the little stumbling block of human nature, might be useful.

The use of hand-guns is as a means to an end, so even if we could magically disappear them, there would be no shortage of other types of wounding and killing. It would be different and no doubt politicians would claim success in resolving the problem of gun-related crime, but it is the “crime” we should be worried about.

Most of which comes from the drug trade. Maybe tis time for someone to get another petition going about that.

This is getting a bit silly, but:

1. Criminals, qua criminals, get everything for free. My watch, my wallet, my car etc. So no, I should say that the rules of supply and demand function in a very different way for criminals than they do for the law-abiding. What, after all, is a bit more expense to a person who’s willing to steal or use violence to meet it–who meets it, moreover, for the express purpose of doing more violence and theft?

2. Yes, fine. The point is that there are better, far less circuitous ways of dealing with this problem. Like focusing on the criminal rather than on just one of the many things he uses to facilitate his crimes. Gun fatalities, knife fatalities? What’s the difference? Less collateral damage, is it? Perhaps. But, again, if this isn’t cynicism, then it’s extreme laziness. Political expediency I think it’s called.

3. (A “screed”! Are you sure of that?) Chesterton “essentially says” nothing of the kind. You’re getting carried away. The reasoning that it is a better way of dealing with crime to address the criminal directly–preferably at an early enough stage that he never becomes one–is, I’m afraid, unimpeachable. Your appeal to the inherent failings of “human nature” are well taken, but completely beside the point. David Miller wouldn’t dream of saying any such thing. Rather, he wishes to convince us of the existence of something like a “pistol nature”.