Gun control: placing costs in context.

• Author: Boyd, Neil

For much of the past two years, advocates of firearm licensing and registration have been attacked by hunters, gun lobbyists, and others concerned about the soaring government costs of the federal program. And in December 2002 the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, released a report that was sharply critical of these increased costs. Dubbed "the billion-dollar registry" by its opponents, it has been quite fairly estimated that the program will have cost more than $1 billion by 2005, 10 years after its inception (Mauser 2001).

What has typically escaped notice, however, is that Auditor General Fraser was not prepared to make any statements about the effectiveness of the program in her December 2002 report, noting, "We did not audit program efficiency or whether it is meeting its objectives" (Canada, Department of Justice 2002: para. 10.21). It is the task of the Auditor General to point to budgetary anomalies, not to examine the relative efficacy of government programs.

The rate of firearm death in Canada

Between 1989 and 1999 the rate of firearm death in Canada dropped from 5.0 per 100,000 to 3.3 per 100,000; this figure included not only declines in culpable homicide but also declines in accidents and suicides. Changes to firearm regulation, beginning in 1978 and culminating in the 1995 approval of the Canadian Firearms Program, predate these declines. Admittedly, however, it is very difficult to determine whether there is a cause-effect relationship between legislative and regulatory changes and the incidence of firearms deaths in Canada.

We have only a correlation, and, as critics note, most of the decline in firearms deaths occurred prior to 1995, the date of the implementation of the Canadian Firearms Program. With cases of firearms homicides, we also have to acknowledge the demographic shift resulting from the baby boom generation passing into middle age in both Canada and the United States: there are fewer young men in the population, and there is, correspondingly, less culpable homicide of all kinds in both countries.

But a demographic shift alone cannot explain the dramatic decrease in all firearms deaths between 1989 and 1999. For example, the significant declines in suicides with firearms cannot be linked to the life cycles of the baby boomers; suicides are most commonly carried out by elderly men, a demographic grouping rarely associated with culpable homicides involving firearms.

It is probably more appropriate to think of the decline in the rate of firearm death as a reflection of cultural change, rather than as a direct consequence of...