CDN-FIREARMS Digest 224 Topics covered in this issue include: 1) Origin of 7,000,000 guns figure (errors!) by Boris Gimbarzevsky 2) those 7,000,000 guns and regional murder rates by Boris Gimbarzevsky 3) Re: Welcome Home Bill Baldwin by LOHSEACH@MAX.CC.UREGINA.CA 4) letter sent to the editor by Skeeter Abell-Smith ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic No. 1 Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 09:59:10 -0600 From: Boris Gimbarzevsky To: cdn-firearms@skatter.usask.ca Subject: Origin of 7,000,000 guns figure (errors!) Message-ID: <199504211559.JAA09564@regulus> Recently I was playing around with some numbers from a paper by Centerwall (1991). Using the numbers from Centerwall's paper, which represent number of pistols/1000 people by region in Canada and number of rifles/1000 people, I was able to calculate a value for total firearms in Canada which is within 8% of the 7,000,000 value. This leads me to believe that the government has used the data from Stenning and Moyer (1981) in their calculation of 7,000,000 guns in Canada - this is the source of data in Centerwall's 1991 paper. Centerwall (1991), describes the Canadian survey as follows: "National data on the prevalence of privately owned handguns in Canada are from a random household survey conducted for the Ministry of the Solicitor General in 1976" "Owing to the sampling frame employed by the Canadian survey, the Atlantic provinces, and the prarie provinces cannot be analyzed individually. The Yukon and NWT were not included in this survey" "The 1976 Canadian Gun Ownership and Use Survey is the only national survey of the prevalence of privately owned handguns to have been undertaken in Canada" There has been another survey of firearms ownership for Canada, but it is not clear how many households were surveyed, or what the national distribution of sampled households was (Killias, 1993). This revealed this survey, one could, if they were really curious, contact Killias through Pim van Meurs who spends much of his time reposting data from this paper on t.p.g as if it was the last word on the subject. I've demolished this [Killias] paper, in my opinion, so someone else can contact Pim. Population data for the various regions for 1976 is taken from Stats Canada, Cat #91-210, but the table is in another stats Canada homicide survey for 1988. The populations of each region are given in thousands. Numbers of pistols and rifles from Stenning and Moyer (1981) are given per 1000 population. Total is rifles+pistols/1000 people. Region Population Pistols Rifles Tot BC 2467 32 243 275 Prarie 3782 15 336 351 Ontario 8264 12 179 191 Quebec 6234 4 142 146 Atlantic 2182 12 275 287 Number of guns one gets from this (in thousands) in 1976 is: Region Population Pistols Rifles BC 2467 78.9 599.5 Prarie 3782 56.7 1270.8 Ontario 8264 99.2 1479.2 Quebec 6234 24.9 885.2 Atlantic 2182 26.2 600.0 --------------------------------------- 22929 285.9 4834.7 This gives a grand total of 5,120,600 guns of all types in Canada in 1976 (excluding Yukon and NWT). 1993 populations are estimated as follows - using the murder rate/100,000 from Juristat (1993), I got the populations of each province. Since NFLD and PEI had overly large errors because of their small populations, I used the 1988 population figures as they were unlikely to have changed significantly. If anyone has better data than mine, feel free to update this table. I also assumed that number of guns/1000 people stayed constant (it hasn't for anyone I know, but this is only an approximation). Repeating this with 1993 populations gives the following table: Region Population Pistols Rifles BC 3536 113.2 859.2 Prarie 4781 71.7 1270.8 Ontario 10722 128.7 1919.2 Quebec 7195 28.8 1021.7 Atlantic 2372 28.5 652.3 --------------------------------------- 28606 370.9 6094.1 This gives a total number of guns in Canada of 6,465,000 which is close to figure of 7,000,000 which has been used extensively by Allan Rock and his cronies. What is interesting about this is that number of pistols (370,900) is far too low - if there are 1,220,000 restricted weapons, and most of these are pistols, then either everyone in Canada was suddenly posessed with an urge to start pistol shooting after 1977, or there are a lot more guns in Canada than the Rockenfuhrer is admitting to. If we assume that rifles and pistols are bought in equal numbers (unrealistic since it is so much easier and cheaper to buy a rifle), and that 220,000 of the restricted weapons are rifles of various types, then this still leaves us with some 1,000,000 pistols in Canada whereas we expect only 370,900. This means that the number of rifles is actually 21,360,000 rather than the 6,904,100 expected and total number of guns in Canada is 23,160,000. No matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to make 23,160,000 equal 7,000,000. (Feel free to correct me if you have actual numbers to use instead of my approximations). I suspect that the government has a fairly good idea of how many guns there are in Canada, but they may be making the figures lower in order to account for non-complience with registration. Given the history of registration in Australia, a 25-30% compliance rate might be overly optomistic. In the future, the government might suddenly discover this huge cache of unregistered guns and use this as an excuse for confiscation as their "moderate" approach obviously hasn't worked. This, of course, is sheer speculation on my part. There are also some interesting regional differences which one can notice. Quebec has, per-capita, the lowest firearms ownership rate and this might explain the strongest support for C-68 in this province. It also, had the highest firearms homicide rate (as a fraction of homicides) in Canada) in 1976. Juristat (1993) doesn't break down homicides by means used according to province, but I suspect that Quebec still is the leader in this regard. If anyone has hard data regarding percentage of homicides caused with firearms in each province by year, I'd really be interested in seeing it. This type of data is crucial in demonstrating that while maybe most Quebeckers can't be trusted with guns, in Western Canada the people can. I suspect that this is due to childhood exposure to guns - the more people view them as just another tool one has kicking around the house, the less likely they are to abuse them. References Centerwall, B. Homicide and Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States. American Journal of Epidemiology. 134(11):1245-1260, (1991) Stenning, PC., Moyer S. Firearms Ownership and use in Canada: A report of survey findings, 1976. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto (1981) Kallias, M., International correlations between gun ownership and rates of homicide and suicide. CMAJ, 148:1721-1725 (1993) Boris Gimbarzevsky ----- End Included Message ----- ------------------------------ Topic No. 2 Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 10:21:30 -0600 From: Boris Gimbarzevsky To: cdn-firearms@skatter.usask.ca Subject: those 7,000,000 guns and regional murder rates Message-ID: <199504211621.KAA09579@regulus> Over the last 24 hours, I've been playing around a bit more with these numbers, and the preliminary results suggest a completely new way to attack Stalin Rock and his band of incompetents. All of the incidents which the government uses for justifying its ban on guns have occurred in Quebec - there has never been any incident such as Mark Lepine's rampage anywhere else in the country and Valerie Fabricant is unique in Canadian history in his misuse of legally obtained pistols. I began to wonder if Quebec truly was a distinctly murderous society. The material which follows contains: (1) a calculation of the lethality of rifles and pistols in various regions of Canada. (2) testing of a uniform lethality model for guns in Canada and showing that this hypothesis is false. (3) consideration of some reasons why rates of gun ownership and murder rates are so different in various areas of the country (4) some thoughts about cost/benefit considerations with gun registration. As far as references go, I think you have all of them from my last post. Any data which is unreferenced came either from: Juristat 1993 Stats Canada publication 1988 which looked at murder in Canada - I only photocopied interesting data and don't have details of this publication handy. Scarf (1981) Evaluation of the Canadian Gun control Legislation. Final report. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The analysis below has its faults, and before I post it to the rest of the internet, I should probably have people like Taylor Buckner and/or Gary Mauser critique it. If Gary Mauser does have more up to date data, I would like to see it. I must confess to only skimming through the firearms poll which he did - since I don't find the conclusions surprising, I see no need for a meticulous dissection of the study to find its flaws. The major problem with my calculations below is that I am assuming that 1976 gun prevalence figures apply in 1988. If those really are the latest available, I have no choice. I have proceeded on the assumption so dear to the anti-gun side - guns by themselves will cause crime. Accordingly, the amount of gun homicide should be related to the number of guns in a given population. One could object to my employment of the measure murders/10,000 guns as the measure employed by Killias (1993) of fraction of households with guns is a more valid indicator of the availability of guns in a population. On the other hand, if there is some deeply primeval aggressive force that flows from a gun into a person who holds it, then an individual with 50 guns would be much more likely to use them in a murderous fashion - especially if he had them all in the same small room. To calculate numbers of guns in Canada in 1988, I have taken the populations from Stats Canada for the various regions in 1988 and used 1976 incidence figures for guns to obtain total numbers of guns in each region of the country. My use of carrying permit data for various provinces suggests that, at least in 1981, the regional differences in gun ownership rates were indistinguishable from those in 1976. The main reason for using 1988 is that I only have homicide figures broken down by province and means used to commit the homicide for that year. There are some discrepancies in population figures also, but I won't get into this now since this is already getting too long for a post which was supposed to correct one sentence in a previous post. First of all the numbers of guns estimated for each region. Region Pop/1000 Pistols/1000 Rifles/1000 Tot-guns/1000 Atlantic 2293.9 27.5 630.8 658.3 Quebec 6638.3 26.6 942.6 969.2 Ontario 9426.1 113.1 1687.3 1800.4 Prairies 4492.0 67.4 1509.3 1576.7 BC 2983.8 95.5 725.1 820.6 ------------------------------------------------------------- Canada 25834.1 330.0 5495.1 5825.1 Canada totals above exclude Yukon and NWT. Canada taken as a whole has the following rates of gun ownership: Total guns - 225.5/1000 Rifles - 212.7 Pistols - 12.8 Next, one needs to look at numbers of murders by regions and how they are committed. In this table, H-tot - total # of homicides H-P - # of homicides carried out using pistols H-R - rifle homicides (actually all non-pistol firearm homicides) H-Gun - total of rifle and pistol homicides RGtot - gun homicides expressed as homicides/10,000 guns in region RPistols- pistol homicides as rate - homicides/10,000 pistols in region RRifles - rate of rifle homicides/10,000 rifles Region H-tot H-P H-R H-Gun RGtot RPistols RRifles Atlantic 27 3 7 10 0.152 1.089 0.111 Quebec 154 13 46 59 0.609 4.897 0.488 Ontario 186 15 30 45 0.250 1.326 0.178 Prairies 120 8 21 29 0.184 1.187 0.139 BC 79 6 19 25 0.305 0.628 0.262 ---------------------------------------------------------- Canada 566 45 123 168 0.288 1.364 0.224 If there was a uniform lethality of guns in the whole of Canada, one would expect that there should not be a significant difference between the number of firearms murders calculated for each region based on aggregate data for the whole country. Since the number of homicides is so small, only an analysis of total gun related homicides is presented. The next table gives expected and actual numbers of firearms homicides for each region of Canada. Here: H-Gun - actual # of firearms homicides HPcalc - calculated # of pistol homicides based on national data HRcalc - calc # of rifle homicides based on national data HGtot-calc - total calculated # of firearms homicides Calc-Act - difference between calculated # and actual # Region H-Gun HPcalc HRcalc HGtot-calc Calc-Act Atlantic 10 3.74 14.13 18.96 -8.96 Quebec 59 3.61 21.11 27.91 31.09 Ontario 45 15.38 37.80 51.84 -6.84 Prairies 29 9.16 33.81 45.41 -16.41 BC 25 13.00 16.24 23.63 1.37 In order to determine whether or not the differences seen among regional lethality of firearms, one can use chi-squared test to test hypothesis that differences seen merely represent random variations. The calculation of chi-squared is SUM[(expected(i)-meas(i))**2/expected(i)]. For above table get chi-squared of 45.78. This allows one to reject the null hypothesis at a p<0.005 (chi-squared p=0.005 with 3 degrees of freedom is 12.838). Now that we know we are dealing with statistically significant regional differences, one can make valid comments about the variations in homicide rates one sees across Canada. The most striking outlier is Quebec - there are 31 more homicides than one would expect given the number of firearms present in the population. Next in line are the prairie provinces - they have 16.4 FEWER homicides than one would expect given their high gun ownership. Before considering these in more detail, I will first consider some potential problems with this data. Centerwall (1991) was concerned with the validity of Quebec firearms survey data. He writes: "In 1969-1970, the Quebec separatist movement entered into open conflict with existing Canadian political institutions, resulting in kidnappings of government officials and widespread popular unrest and civil disturbances. In the end, the Canadian government forcibly suppressed these separatist aspirations by imposing martial law (accompanied by mass arrests) in Quebec during the October crisis of 1970. All of this was recent history at the time of the 1976 Canadian Gun Ownership and Use Survey. Under the circumstances, Quebec citizens may have been reluctant to give candid responses to a handgun survey originating from the central government in Ottawa." "The survey insturment was indeed pretested and found to be valid, but the pretesting was conducted in Ontario. Therefore, the actual prevalence of handguns in Quebec may be substantially greater than is indicated by the Canadian survey." What argues against this explanation is that the distribution of carry permits for purposes of target practice at a gun club would suggest that BC has over 8 times the number of pistols that Quebec has - in keeping with the results of the survey. Using data from Scarf (1981) the ratio of average number of carrying permits issued in BC/Quebec for 1979-1981 is 8.6. It is noteable that the number of carrying permits/10,000 population is 10% of the number of pistols/10,000 population. Either only a small fraction of pistol owners have active carrying permits at any given time, or the data given is for NEW carrying permits. If anyone has information which would clarify this situation, I would be interested in seeing it. Recently there has been additional data presented both on this mailing list and on national Canadian news services which supports the presence of an east-west gradient of firearms ownership. I have yet to see a recent news report which puts Quebec anywhere but last place in the per-capita ownership of firearms. I have also yet to see any information which suggests that the storage of vast numbers of unregistered pistols in Quebec is anything more than a hypothetical explanation for the vastly greater lethality of pistols in Quebec based on "official" statistics. Quebec makes great efforts to ensure that the remainder of the country percieves it as a distinct culture. Given the vastly greater lethality of firearms in the hands of Quebeckers, I have no hesitation in supporting their contention of cultural distinctness and note that such a distinction is statistically significant with p<0.005. One now needs to consider the possible reasons for this uniqueness. One possibility is that there is a larger proportion of native Indians in Quebec than in other parts of Canada. In 1988, native homicide rates were 14.19/100,000 compared to non-native homicide rates of 1.84/100,000 (Stats Can (1988)). With the data I have, it is impossible to ascertain if this is the case - there are several reserves in Quebec which straddle the US border and it is alleged that there is a free flow of guns through these reserves. The Oka standoff demonstrated that there was no lack of firepower on the native side. If a sufficient number of unregistered pistols and other firearms have been brought over this essentially wide open border, then the "official" firearms numbers in Quebec are a significant underestimate and the excessive lethality of Quebec guns is an artifact of this underestimation. Next, it is possible that there are social tensions in Quebec which are not present in the rest of Canada. A Quebec author (whose name I've forgotten) wrote a book entitled "White niggers of North America" in which he denounced the English suppression of the French in Quebec. Freely using his analogy, one notes that there is a proportionately higher lethality of guns in the hands of young blacks in large cities in the US. One might expect that a group in Canada which felt it had been subjected to similar historical wrongs as blacks in the US might be more inclined to justify criminal use of firearms to correct these past wrongs. This is pure speculation, but there is no getting around the data - guns are much more lethal in Quebec. A final possibility is that there is a far more extensive network of organized crime in Quebec in which guns are used to deal with individuals who threaten the criminal organization. Such a criminal population would constitute a distinct subgroup which cannot be considered in the analysis used for the rest of the country. In closing, Quebec remains an enigma, but one which needs to be addressed with regard to Stalin Rocks gun registration plans. In the Prairie provinces, one finds the oppossite to Quebec - there are fewer murders than one would expect given the very large number of firearms present. This is in large part a cultural phenomenon. Growing up in Northern Alberta, I was exposed to guns before age 10 and viewed them no differently than any other tool I used. They are ubiquitous - the sight of a truck with a moose in the back and a rear window gunrack full of rifles might be frightening to a city dweller from central Canada, but it is a common sight in Alberta in the fall. Having guns as a part of ones upbringing makes one much less likely to use one in a fight possibly because of the strong firearms safety training one gets in childhood. If the homicide rate was related to the level of aggrevated assault in a region, then Alberta's murder rate would be the highest in Canada as it has a far higher rate of aggrevated assault than Quebec - 146/100,000 compared to 75/100,000 in Quebec in 1976 (Centerwall, 1991). Unless one assumes a massive under-reporting of aggrevated assault in Quebec, it is clear that there are major cultural differences at work here. The differences in firearms ownership rates and firearms misuse rates between the Prairie provinces and Quebec are as great as the percieved differences between US and Canadian firearms misuse rates. From the data presented, Quebec is far closer to the US level of firearms homicide than the western Canadian reality. This difference needs to be publicized to a much greater extent than it currently is. Perhaps a compromise would be to apply bill C-68 solely to Quebec as it may not be possible to trust the citizens of this province with firearms. It is clear that no such legislation is necessary in the rest of Canada. With regard to BC, it actually comes much closer to being the most Canadian of provinces with regard to firearms homicide than Ontario (which would expect to claim this title). Despite having the highest per-capita ownership of pistols in Canada, they are used in homicide only half as often as one would expect - 0.628 homicides/10,000 pistols compared to an expected 1.36/10,000 based on total Canadian pistol homicides. This unexpectedly low pistol homicide rate is equalized by a higher than expected rifle murder rate which is twice that of the prairie provinces despite a substantial proportion of the BC population being made up of migrants from the prairie provinces. In many ways, BC is closer to US levels of violence than the rest of Canada in that the total rate of murder has been the highest in Canada. However, only a minority of murders involve firearms. Most murders involve knives or beatings and this trend continues. There has always been a large population of heroin users in BC, and people from the rest of Canada are drawn to BC, and especially Vancouver, for this reason. Significant violence is associated with disputes among dealers, but there does not appear to be any organization which controls the supply of heroin in the fashion that it is alleged that organized crime does in Montreal. The supply of heroin periodically increases dramatically with marked lowering of prices. This last happened in 1992-1993 and in 1993 355 heroin users died of overdoses in BC. With the decrease in heroin supply in 1994-1995, the number of overdoses has decreased, but violence associated with disputes between dealers and addicts committing robberies has markedly increased. This cyclic variation in homicide as a result of heroin availability appears to play a significant role in BC overall homicide figures. Note: this is my personal interpretation based on some 5 years spent at St. Pauls Hospital in which I've seen quite a few junkies as patients and seen the medical consequences of both heroin scarcity and excess. If I'm attributing an overly significant effect of the heroin trade on BC homicide rates, then I would be interested in seeing more objective data. I certainly am biased in my views of this phenomenon being, medically speaking, at the epicenter of this phenomenon in BC. Next, I want to turn to an epidemiologic analysis of gun control in terms of costs to prevent homicide by gun registration. Pistol registration is a fact of life in Canada. Given that the homicide rate in Canada is 1.36/10,000 pistols as compared to .224/10,000 rifles, it is easy to conclude that pistols are 6 times more dangerous than rifles. There are two things that need to be kept in mind in such calculations: (1) There were only 45 murders with pistols in 1988 - this is such a small number that one can expect huge fluctuations given the coincidence of several gangland disputes in a given year which can easily double or triple this number. (Did this happen in 1990 and 1991?) (2) Quebec has a disproportionate pistol homicide rate - 29% of Canadian pistol homicides are committed in a province that has 8% of registered pistols in Canada. If one excludes Quebecs population, and pistols from Canadian figures, one gets a lethality rate of 1.06/10,000 pistols for TROC. It should also be noted that rifles are also 4 times as lethal in the hands of Quebec owners as maritimers or prairie residents. When Centerwall (1991) compared homicide rates in Canada and US border states, a rather surprising finding was that despite the much easier availability of pistols in the US, in the case of BC and Washington state, the pistol lethality rate (homicides/10,000 pistols) was statistically indistinguishable. It should be noted that this was based on comparisons of white populations - in the case of disgruntled Canadian minorities, a loosening of laws regarding acquisition of pistols would likely lead to increased homicides in these groups as is the case in Washington state. Still, it makes one wonder - the Canadian system of strictly regulating pistols seems to be no better than the anarchistic American system of letting anyone who has the money and no criminal record to buy as many pistols as they want. I suppose that when one looks at the problem of Quebec, with a pistol lethality rate of 4.90, then one has to keep up this system lest the unique culture in that province be decimated in an orgy of homicide from the liberalization of firearms laws with regard to pistols. Rifles are another story. To keep on with medical analogies, the prevention of disease by treating a whole population is referred to as primary prevention whereas decreasing mortality from disease in a population already known to have a disease is known as secondary prevention. To put this in an easily understandable analogy, attempting to decrease rate of heart disease by lowering whole population cholesterol levels by changing diet is primary prevention, and, also a rather spectacular failure. Aggressively lowering the cholesterol of people who have already had a heart attack, or demonstrate symptoms of coronary artery disease has been shown to decrease TOTAL mortality, is a lot more cost effective than primary prevention, but requires a re-examination of the dogma that prevention is cheaper than treating disease (There is an interesting article exploring this myth in the April 1995 Scientific American). As far as I am concerned, primary prevention as a strategy to decrease heart disease by lowering cholesterol in the Canadian population is a failure. Proponents of this view maintain that there still hasn't been a large enough trial to prove the efficacy of this method, but when one is talking about trials involving hundreds of thousands of people with no demonstrable benefit in terms of total mortality, one begins to suspect that perhaps the model might need a bit of modification despite the strong correlations one finds between the average blood cholesterol of a population and rate of heart disease in that population. There is an uncanny similarity between the cholesterol/heart disease medical model and the guns/homicide model which politicians are determined to inflict on the Canadian public for their own good. With regard to cholesterol, it is simple enough to show that treating a population does diminish death rate from heart disease. Where this process gets interesting is when one calculates how much it costs to prevent one heart attack - it is far cheaper to treat people in hospital when they have their heart attack and then aggressively change their lifestyle on discharge rather than to treat the whole population with the intent of preventing heart attacks. I have done a similar analysis involving registration of rifles and the results are astounding. For this analysis, assume that it costs $87 to register one rifle. Changing this value doesn't really make that much difference to the numbers one gets. Furthermore, the assumption that registration of a rifle will automatically insure that it will never be used in a homicide is untenable - let us say that registration will cut the risk of homicide by 50%. This is a rather generous value, but we need to play along with the government to some extent. Also, 50% is a very anadian number given this countries strong history of compromise in any situation. Nationally, we know that the rifle lethality rate is 0.224. By registering guns, we can realistically expect to reduce this to .112 with our very Canadian compromise assumptions. Now how much will this cost per life saved? With our present system of totally unregulated rifles which are so dangerous to the health of Canadians, there is one murder for every 44,643 rifles which are owned by the citizens of this country - a rate which is totally unacceptable. Since we have only a 50% efficacy rate (Stalin Rock's underlings are frantically working on refinements to the registration system to improve this figure), we have to register twice as many rifles, or 89,286 to prevent one homicide. The cost of this, a mere $7,767,857. If this seems excessive, remember we are talking about the life of a human being! What is interesting about this is that the same government which feels that such an expenditure to prevent one murder using a primary prevention protocol is unwilling to compensate drug expenses which are even a fraction of this amount when it involves preventing common diseases. Below is a table which shows cost of registration per life saved for each region of Canada assuming 50% efficacy. Region RRifle Cost/life saved $ Atlantic 0.111 11,012,000 Quebec 0.488 3,566,000 Ontario 0.178 9,775,280 Prairies 0.139 12,517,986 BC 0.262 6,641,222 Residents of the Praries and Atlantic Canada are likely to be enraged by these costs - if I were an Albertan with a large gun collection, and I had to fork out $87/gun so that I could contribute towards the $12,500,000 it took to ensure that an unemployed drunk wouldn't shoot his inebriated common law wife, I might be inclined to get a little ornery. Only in Quebec, with its low birth rate, and the crucial importance of the French culture to the maintenance of a distinct Canadian identity, is the value of $3,566,000 to prevent a murder of a member of this unique cultural group justified. Speaking as a physician, if someone came to me with a drug with a similar cost benefit ratio for a rare, but fatal disease, I would politely show him the door. Any physician who is capable of rational thought would infer that primary prevention at such a cost is a criminal waste of money. What is needed is secondary prevention, and this means concentrating ones efforts on high risk groups. We know that there is a significantly greater risk of homicide in Quebec - it is worth spending money to find out why there is such a distinctly murderous culture in that province. Native Indians have a homicide rate 8 times that of the non-native population. Having seen a great number of the urban native population of Vancouver who have come through the doors of St. Pauls Hospital for various medical problems, I can state with some confidence that the money spent on gun registration will do almost nothing to decrease the rate of complications of violence in this group of individuals. Before I get accused of racism, I would also like to add that I would much rather deal with these native patients than the "worried well" yuppie population I have encountered at other hospitals in more well-off areas of Vancouver. Whenever I deal with this latter group of patients, it takes all my self control to prevent my lecturing them on the advantages of an American style system where for a stiff hourly fee I would happily listen to their trivial complaints for as long as they could afford it. At least with the former class of patients, they only come in when they think necessary (really sick), don't bother me with neurotic complaints, and don't have impossible expectations of the medical system. I can think of a lot better ways to spend the huge amounts of money which gun registration will entail to solve some of the underlying problems which cause homicides in these disadvantages groups. Boris ----- End Included Message ----- ------------------------------ Topic No. 3 Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 10:40:32 -0600 From: LOHSEACH@MAX.CC.UREGINA.CA To: cdn-firearms@skatter.usask.ca Subject: Re: Welcome Home Bill Baldwin Message-ID: <199504211640.KAA09588@regulus> I knew Bill Baldwin in Calgary in the early 80s, when we both shot at the Calgary and District Shooter's Club and at the Mettawa Armouries. I heard he won the 1000 metre iron sights competition at Bisly at that time. Ironically, one of my prize guns made useless by a burglar two years ago (made off with the bolt and left the gun) still sports a front sight that Bill sweated on for me. I didn't know him intimately, but he struck me as a quiet, friendly, helpful shooter, and a very modest champion. He definitely deserves our help. My cheque is on the way. Achim ----- End Included Message ----- ------------------------------ Topic No. 4 Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 12:17:45 -0600 From: Skeeter Abell-Smith To: cdn-firearms@skatter.usask.ca Subject: letter sent to the editor Message-ID: <199504211817.MAA09638@regulus> ----- Begin Included Message ----- Following is a letter sent to the editor of our local paper. Dear Sir: On a television newscast last week a commentator remarked that the equivalent of the KGB was being reinstated in Russia, and that no warrant would be required to enter homes. Perhaps this commentator didnt realize it, but if Bill C-68 an Act respecting firearms and other weapons passes Parliament, as it appears it will, we will have the same thing here in Canada. Bill C-68 authorizes entry, search and seizure without warrant where no crime is known or suspected. It authorizes imprisoning anyone who refuses to help ransack his own home, or refuses to answer, before he has any chance to seek legal advice, any question put to him. This Bill provides a sentence of up to five years imprisonment for expressing an opinion deemed to be false, even where the opinion is inadmissible in a court of law. It takes the actual making of criminal law out of the hands of Parliament. The scope of the Order-in-Council power lost to Parliament by these delegations is staggering. We have seen this type of legislation before -- in police states all over the world. It does not belong in Canada. We wonder why so many of our politicians support such authoritarianism. We wonder if politicians who support it can be trusted with power. Yours truly, ----- End Included Message ----- ------------------------------ End of CDN-FIREARMS Digest 224 ******************************