I don’t often post related to firearms but the recent spate of letters and comments in the press from the Coalition for Gun Control and the Canadian Chiefs of Police has been getting on my nerves. While they might like to claim that the gun registry is necessary for the safety of women the fact of the matter is that gun owners are – statistically – less likely to harm their spouses.
To top it off, the firearms registry is responsible for draining precious resources that could otherwise be used to prevent domestic abuse.
Statistics Canada’s 2008 report on Family Violence shows only 40 of over 38,000 incidents of domestic violence involved firearms. In other words, 99.92% of spousal assaults didn’t involve guns. In instances where spousal abuse involved physical violence, firearms were used against women 34 times and against men 6 times out of over 17,000 violent assaults.
According to the Canadian Center for Justice Statistics, the total spending for shelters in 2006 totaled $317 million. In the same year the government spent $82 million on the firearms program.
The 2007 Commissioner of Firearms report states that 70 of the 1,758 firearms license revocations that year were the result of domestic violence. At the end of 2007 there were 1,877,880 individuals licenses to own firearms in Canada.
The numbers translate to a rate of 3.7 revocations per 100,000 gun owners.
The 2006 Census reports there were over 31.6 million people in Canada resulting in a rate of 120.2 incidents of domestic violence per 100,000 population and 53.7 violent assaults per 100,000 population.
In other words, firearms owners are between 14.5 and 32.5 times less likely to commit domestic violence. Yet responsible firearms owners continue to be demonized as ”potential” abusers by registry supporters.
While we must be vocal in condemning all forms of domestic violence, spending a disproportionate amount of limited tax dollars to achieve a relatively meager reduction in the rate of domestic violence seems counterintuitive.
Certainly, the bulk of victims of spousal abuse would benefit more from expanded shelter space and increased funding for existing programs than they do from government spending millions of dollars to maintain a list of firearms. Scrapping the registry will not do away with firearms licensing, the main tool police use to revoke firearms ownership.
Scrapping the registry also won’t make women more likely to be abused. If anything, it will free up tax dollars for programs that make a real difference in keeping Canadians safe.
But don’t take my word for it, look up the stats yourself:
- Statistics Canada – Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile 2008 – Stats for domestic violence in 2006.
- Juristat – Canada’s shelters for abused women, 2005/2006 – budgets for 2005/2006 spending on women’s shelters.
- Treasury Board – RPP 2005-2006 Canada Firearms Centre – 2006 budget for Firearms Center.
- Commissioner of Firearms Reports.
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