Canada: What happens when a crime victim takes a gun from a criminal and shoots him? The victim goes to jail

Canadian man takes gun from home invaders and shoots on of them; he is now charged with attempted murder and nine other firearms charges. From the Herald News in Nova Scotia, Canada:

A man is charged with attempted murder and a raft of firearms offences after helping fend off home invaders, one of whom he’s now charged with shooting. 

Kyle Earl Munroe was arrested on July 12 after RCMP and Halifax Regional Police responded to a report of a home invasion involving firearms at a home in Porters Lake.
Police said that three men entered the residence with guns and a struggle took place with two men inside. 

The two in the home seized a firearm from one of the suspects and several shots were fired as the suspects fled. Police later located one of the suspects, who had non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. 

Munroe faces charges of attempted murder, intent to discharge a firearm, intent to discharge a firearm when being reckless, careless use of a firearm, improper storage of a firearm, pointing a firearm, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, 

unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm knowing that possession is unauthorized, and possession for the purpose of trafficking. . . .

Canadian Supreme rules that the Canadian government can destroy the long gun registration

Brian Lilley with The Rebel has this discussion of the Canadian Supreme ruling that the Canadian government can destroy the long gun registration.

Here is a March 2012 op-ed that I wrote with Gary Mauser on the failure of Canadian gun registration system.

Unfortunately, last week's attack on the Canadian Parliament seems to have doomed some simple long needed reform of gun control

The Huffington Post is quite happy about this:

The Conservative government appears to be quietly shelving its controversial “Common Sense” gun bill in light of Wednesday’s shooting.  

Government House Leader Peter Van Loan’s office was silent Friday about the future of Bill C-42. Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney’s office refused to comment, directing inquiries to Van Loan. The Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act was scheduled to be debated for the first time on the day of the shootings, with three days set aside for discussion. It no longer figures on the government’s stated agenda. 

But NDP Public Safety critic Randall Garrison told The Huffington Post Canada on Friday that he understands why the government might want to shelve this bill for the time being. 

“I think it’s obvious that the climate where firearms were used to murder a member of the Canadian Forces and to bring an attack into the House of Commons means that the climate for a discussion on a bill that would loosen, in any way, restrictions over the licensing of firearms is unlikely to be something the government wants to do right now,” he said. . . .

Unfortunately, these restrictions are the exact opposite of what they should be doing. 

One of the Canadian shooters, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, recent convert to Islam, long criminal record

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau's name was apparently previously known as Michael Joseph Hall prior to converting to Islam.  He had been designated a high-risk traveler and that his passport had recently been confiscated.  Zehaf-Bibeau had a long criminal history with arrests for robbery, making threats, and various drug offenses.  He served time in prison on at least a couple of occasions (67 days for the uttering the threat), but he was still able to obtain a gun.  Apparently, he wasn't on the government's watch list of about 90 high-risk individuals and few under the radar.

This attack comes on the heels of another recent muslim convert who used his car to run over two soldiers in Canada, killing one of them.

Terrorist ideology inspired a recent convert to Islam to drive his car into two Canadian soldiers, killing one, before he was shot dead by police, authorities said on Tuesday.
Quebec police spokesman Guy Lapointe said the act was deliberate and that one of the two soldiers was in uniform. There were no other suspects. 

Public safety minister Steven Blaney called it a “terrible act of violence against our country, against our military and against our values” that was “clearly linked to terrorist ideology”. 

Police identified the dead military member as Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, 53.
The suspect, Martin Couture Rouleau, 25, was known to authorities and recently had his passport seized, police commissioner Bob Paulson said. . . . 

Martin Couture Rouleau staked out the parking lot for 2 hours waiting for the soldiers.  He was apparently arrested in July, but was let go because he hadn't committed a crime and they did not view him as a threat to others.

Sadly, but not surprisingly given these two attacks on soldiers, the Canadian government is urging members of the military not to wear their uniforms when they are off duty.  In the attack today, the ceremonial guard who was in uniform was definitely targeted.

Possibly the weapon used in the attack was a shotgun.  Reports from the Chicago Tribune to the CBC indicate:

"He was wearing blue pants and a black jacket and he had a double barrelled shotgun and he ran up the side of this building here and hijacked a car at gunpoint," construction worker Scott Walsh told Reuters. . . .

In Jerusalem, an Arab terrorist rammed his car into a crowd, killing an infant and wounded several others.

A three-month-old girl, identified by her grandfather as Chaya Zissel, was killed and several US citizens and Israelis were wounded Wednesday evening when a convicted Palestinian terrorist from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan rammed his vehicle into a crowd of people in the capital. . . .  

Sun News Network on "Broken Trust: Gun Grab at High River," Royal Canadian Mounted Police break into law-abiding citizens' homes to confiscate guns

For those who haven't heard of the gun confiscation that took place in High River, Alberta may be surprised by what happened here.  Did the Canadian government use gun registration records to target people's homes?  This show is presented by Lorne Gunter.

Canadians taking up owning long guns after the elimination of registration

This seems like a remarkably positive story about owning guns from the CBC, even if it is just for New Brunswick.

Firearms instructors are scrambling to cope with a sudden increase in demand for gun safety courses. 

Enrolment has jumped by more than 20 per cent in the past year as younger hunters and more women head into the woods and to shooting ranges. 

The end of the federal long gun registry also plays a role in the upswing, says firearms instructor Bob Kierstead. He says the creation of the firearms registry by the federal government in 1993 turned  young people away from hunting and the use of guns. 

"The very, very restrictive legislation that came in on firearms in general, and that turned a lot of the young people away from it," said Keirstead. "Too many hoops to jump through and they turned away from it. That was the big thing that we saw." . . .

Canadian Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau calls long-gun registry 'a failure'

This is a pretty amazing statement by Trudeau.

. . . "The long-gun registry, as it was, was a failure and I'm not going to resuscitate that," Trudeau said while visiting the DART Aerospace plant in Hawkesbury. 

"We will continue to look at ways of keeping our cities safe and making sure that we do address the concerns around domestic violence that happen right across the country, in rural as well as urban areas in which, unfortunately, guns do play a role." 

"But there are better ways of keeping us safe than that registry which is, has been removed," Trudeau said. 

The Liberal leadership hopeful made the comments after he was asked for his view on the now-defunct long-gun registry. 

"I grew up with long guns, rifles and shotguns," explained the son of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. 

"Yes, the RCMP guarding me had handguns and I got to play with them every now and then," said Trudeau, quickly adding that the RCMP was "very responsible" around him and his siblings. . . .  

Trudeau voted against the abolition of the federal long-gun registry. . . .

The registry cost a lot of money, but didn't solve any crimes.

From 2003 to 2009, there were 4,257 homicides in Canada, 1,314 of which were committed with firearms. Data provided last fall by the Library of Parliament reveals that the weapon was identified in fewer than a third of the homicides with firearms, and that about three-quarters of the identified weapons were not registered. Of the weapons that were registered, about half were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide. In just 62 cases — that is, only 4.7 percent of all firearm homicides — was the gun registered to the accused. As most homicides in Canada are not committed with a gun, the 62 cases correspond to only about 1 percent of all homicides.
To repeat, during these seven years, there were only 62 cases — nine a year — where it was even conceivable that registration made a difference. But apparently, the registry was not important even in those cases. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case.
The problem isn’t just with the long-gun registry. The data provided above cover all guns, including handguns. There is no evidence that, since the handgun registry was started in 1934, it has been important in solving a single homicide. . . .

 

Updating the comparison between US and Canadian Unemployment Rates

Back in the middle of 2011 I provided this discussion available here.  As I noted, "the striking feature of this diagram is how the Canadian and US unemployment rates moved so incredibly similarly until after Obama's $830 billion "Stimulus" was passed."  Well, I have updated the numbers.

It looks like after the stimulus dollars ran out that the gap between the unemployment gap two countries got much smaller.

Interview with Ezra Levant Sun TV: Would you put a ‘Gun Free Zone’ sign on

Ezra has a good discussion on Israel. There is no way that a killer could shot dozens of people without resistance.  "I've been to Israel, and I see that every other guy on the street has a gun, so if there was a mass shooting, someone would stop it after it got to one or two casualties, it would never get to 70 people shot."

Average per person wealth in Canada exceeds that for Americans

Might people consider adopting Canada's economic policy of cutting marginal income tax rates and restraining government spending? Canada's marginal corporate income tax rate is about 15% below ours. That is a big difference if investors get to keep 15 cents more of every dollar that they make from Canadian investments. From Bloomberg:

On July 1, Canada Day, Canadians awoke to a startling, if pleasant, piece of news: For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American.

According to data from Environics Analytics WealthScapes published in the Globe and Mail, the net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, while the average American household’s net worth was $319,970.

A few days later, Canada and the U.S. both released the latest job figures. Canada’s unemployment rate fell, again, to 7.2 percent, and America’s was a stagnant 8.2 percent. Canada continues to thrive while the U.S. struggles to find its way out of an intractable economic crisis and a political sine curve of hope and despair. . . .

So where will Americans end up going for health care?

Obama has often said that he would like a health care system like they have in Canada. Look at how so few doctors these days are taking new Medicare patients. If that type of pricing policy is applied across the board, we would see fewer doctors providing services there also.

A Canadian study released Wednesday found that many provinces in our neighbor to the north have seen patients fleeing the country and opting for medical treatment in the United States.

The nonpartisan Fraser Institute reported that 46,159 Canadians sought medical treatment outside of Canada in 2011, as wait times increased 104 percent — more than double — compared with statistics from 1993.

Specialist physicians surveyed across 12 specialties and 10 provinces reported an average total wait time of 19 weeks between the time a general practitioner refers a patient and the time a specialist provides elective treatment — the longest they have ever recorded.

In 2011, Canadians enrolled in the nation’s government-dominated health service waited long periods of time for an estimated 941,321 procedures. As many as 2.8 percent of Canadians were waiting for treatment at any given time, according to the Institute.

“In some cases, these patients needed to leave Canada due to a lack of available resources or a lack of appropriate procedure/technology,” according to the Institute. “In others, their departure will have been driven by a desire to return more quickly to their lives, to seek out superior quality care, or perhaps to save their own lives or avoid the risk of disability.” . . .

On a related note:

Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.

The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court. . . .

News coverage of Unemployment in US and Europe fails to mention how unemployment is defined differently

From an Associated Press article in the Washington Post and Fox News on Monday: 

Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, said unemployment rose to 11.1 percent in May from 11 percent the previous month. . . . May’s unemployment rate compares badly with an unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in the United States and 4.4 percent in Japan, and is expected to rise further in the coming months as the eurozone economy is forecast to slide back into recession this year. . . .

Here is a headline from the San Jose Mercury News: Think 8.2% unemployment is bad? It's a record 11.1% in Europe.  The exact same headline has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times. 

The US definition of being unemployed is available at the BLS website.  But note that it is much easier to be defined as unemployed in Europe that the US.

the EU includes those who only study job advertisements as unemployed (if they pass the other screens)—this is true in Canada as well—while the United States does not consider reading ads as active job search. In addition, persons waiting to start a new job are considered unemployed in Europe, but in the United States they are not considered unemployed unless they have actively searched for work within the previous four weeks. . . .

The US BLS does provide adjusted unemployment numbers for some countries based upon how the US defines unemployment.  Take the comparison between the US and Canada, which has been studied fairly extensively.  If you look at the official numbers and ignore that Canada defines its unemployment rate more the way European countries do, it would look like the difference in unemployment rates in April was 0.8 percentage points.  In actuality, the gap was more than twice that, 1.7 percentage points.

In March, for example, the official French unemployment rate was 0.3% below what the BLS calculated the actual rate to be.  The difference for other countries that the BLS can't compare are likely to be much, much greater.  For those interested, the EuroStat EU unemployment data is available here.

Men are much more likely than women to want legalized prostitution in Britain and Canada

From a new Angus Reid Public Opinion survey:

As was observed in a Canadian study on this topic conducted last year, there are some marked gender differences in Britain. Women are more likely to call for an approach that punishes both prostitutes and “clients” (44%) than to support a move towards consensual prostitution (30%). Conversely, men are more likely to believe that nobody should be punished (49% to 33%). The notion of decriminalisation is definitely more popular with men (52%) than women (29%).

Canadian member of parliament resigns from NDP over gun registration issue

Interesting story about how the NDP yanked Hyer's speaking time before the House so that he couldn't make a public statement on his decision to resign.

Bruce Hyer has quit the federal New Democrats, electing to sit as an Independent member of Parliament, weeks after being at odds with his party about the end of the long-gun registry.
The decision by one of the party's northern Ontario MPs marks the second time this year the party has suffered a resignation, the first being Lise St-Denis who now sits as a Liberal. . . .
Hyer was one of two New Democrats to vote with the government to end the long-gun registry, a move for which he was disciplined. His departure leaves the NDP with 101 seats.

Washington Examiner piece: "Ask Canada -- gun registration won't make D.C. safer"

My piece with Gary Mauser in the Washington Examiner starts this way:

The D.C. Council will soon vote on a new law that would eliminate several obstacles for gun buyers -- a five-hour training course, ballistics testing, a vision test, and a ban on certain types of ammunition. But they will leave unchanged the registration requirement for gun owners. D.C. could learn a lot from Canada's decision to finally rescind its gun registry in February.Beginning in 1998, Canadians spent a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a registry for long guns -- in the U.S., the same amount per gun owner would come to $67 billion. For all that money, the registry was never credited with solving a single murder. Instead, it became an enormous waste of police officers' time, diverting their efforts from traditional policing activities. . . .

Some relevant links are here:

 D.C. Council panel agrees to discard some gun rules

 Fox Can't Keep Story Straight On D.C. Gun Laws

"Democrats in the United States more likely to believe in Bigfoot (33%) than Republicans or Independents."

Apparently Americans are more likely than Canadians to believe in Big Foot, and Democrats are responsible for pulling up this average. The results are from a new Angus Reid survey. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is outside the margin of error.

Newest Op-ed piece: Death of a Long-Gun Registry

My piece with Gary Mauser at National Review Online starts this way:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.
Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.
Nice logic, but reality never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene, and when they are left at the scene, they have not been registered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered crime guns are left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.
The statistics speak for themselves. . . . .

Solid majority of Canadians support the death penalty

The poll implies that Canadians support the death penalty in much the same way that it is done in the United States, which requires some type of special circumstances. Of course, despite what might be true in the movies, there has yet to be a case in the US where someone was incorrectly put to death. Even in the provinces with the most opposition, the opposition never rises above 45 percent and the next highest opposition is just 32 percent. From Angus Reid Public Opinion:

The survey conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion in partnership with the Toronto Star found that 63 per cent of the 1,002 Canadians surveyed across the country believe the death penalty is sometimes appropriate. Sixty-one per cent said capital punishment, which was abolished in Canada in 1976, is warranted for murder.

“I think people might be warming to the idea of having it as an option on the table, if anything just as a deterrent,” said Jaideep Mukerji of Angus Reid.

But Mukerji said the poll also reveals that it is “not a black and white” issue for many Canadians. Given the choice of supporting the death penalty or life imprisonment, 50 per cent chose the latter, the survey found. . . .

In British Columbia and Alberta, about seven in 10 support the return of the death penalty; six in 10 Ontarians, or 62 per cent, agree.

The most opposition was in Quebec, with about 45 per cent against the return of capital punishment. Some 32 per cent in Ontario and 24 per cent in British Columbia were also opposed.

“These respondents (about 75 per cent) are primarily concerned over the possibility of wrongful convictions leading to executions, but most (54 per cent) also feel that even if a convicted murderer has taken a life it is wrong to take the murderer’s own life as punishment,” the survey results stated. . . .

Thanks to Mario Canseco for this link to the full poll results.

Canadian gun registry advocates cite the United Nations' Declaration on Archives

The National Post has this editorial.

In democracies, citizens are the sovereigns, not governments or government archivists. The right of a government to preserve a record should never, therefore, supersede the right of its citizens to their privacy.

Discussing Canada's gun registry program on the Sun News Network

A video of the interview can be seen here.