Canadian Liberal Party Proposes to Ban Handguns

First the Canadian Prime Minister simply made up numbers regarding where Canadian crime guns were coming from in a bold lie directly to Secretary of State Rice. Now that an election is at hand, he wants to ban handguns.

Prime Minister Paul Martin will venture into a violence-plagued area of Toronto on Thursday to announce a sweeping ban on handguns, The Canadian Press has learned.

Martin was scheduled to visit Toronto’s troubled Jane-Finch area to make a “safer communities announcement.” Liberal sources have confirmed the announcement includes a ban on handguns. . . .

Thanks to Bruce Korol for sending this article to me.

Wisconsin State Senate Passes Right to Carry by 70 to 30%

The state Senate passed a bill tonight that would allow residents 21 and over to carry concealed guns if they passed a training course.

The measure passed 23-10 after five Democrats joined 18 Republicans in supporting the bill (SB 403). If that two-thirds majority holds, it would be strong enough to override a promised veto by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.

The Assembly will likely take the bill up next Tuesday. It is expected to pass that house, but it is unclear whether two-thirds of the representatives will support it.

Doyle vetoed a similar measure in 2003. The Senate overrode that veto, but the Assembly came one vote short of doing so.

"Men Warm Globe, Women Feel the Heat, Group Claims": This is just too funny

Here is where feminism and environmentalism meet:

The debate over climate change evolved into a battle of the sexes Monday at the 11th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal. The spokesman for a feminist-based environmental group accused men of being the biggest contributors to human-caused "global warming" and lamented that women are bearing the brunt of the negative climate consequences created by men.

"Women and men are differently affected by climate change and they contribute differently to climate change," said Ulrike Rohr, director of the German-based group called "Genanet-Focal point gender, Environment, Sustainability."

Rohr, who is demanding "climate gender justice," left no doubt as to which gender she believes was the chief culprit in emitting greenhouse gasses. . . .

San Francisco Chronicle article lamenting what people will do for protection without their guns

I wish that newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, had a few more of these articles before the vote.

For a long time, Margaret Hurst lived in fear.

Gangs control turf just a few blocks from her Mission District apartment in San Francisco, and she's sure a neighbor across the street deals drugs. Her building was broken into four times in one year. She saw teenagers on her street display a gun. And while she was stopped at a red light one day, a man tried to punch in her car window in a case of road rage.

So she bought a handgun. Now Hurst is no longer scared.

"I'll tell you one thing. If I'm going down, I'm taking them with me," said 49-year-old Hurst, who is about as un-Charlton Heston as any woman with a British accent, braided bun and long flowing skirt could be.

After a heated campaign brought the national debate over gun control to San Francisco, the city's famously liberal voters passed a law last month banning the sale, manufacture and distribution of firearms and ammunition within city limits. The measure, which takes effect Jan. 1, also makes it illegal for residents to possess handguns.

And as that date approaches, handgun owners like Hurst are becoming increasingly fearful of the consequences. . . .

Thanks to Ben Zycher for sending this article to me.

Trade-offs everywhere: civil liberties involve them also

This Assistant District Attorney for Kings County should be made an honorary economist. There are trade-offs everywhere and he provides some nice examples here.

. . . All of our rights can have dreadful consequences. Including those mandating jury trials, search warrants, probable cause for arrests, and face-to-face testimony —all sometimes allow dirtbags who belong in jail to walk the streets. Not to mention the rights of a significant number of "hip hop" artists — whose freedom of expression, attitudes and lifestyles do a lot more to create a cynical culture of violence among young people than the NRA or any gun company.

All civil liberties involve social cost. But the cost is lower than that of their absence, which would expose us all to organized oppression, both criminal and official, much worse than random street crime. And the costs of such liberties diminish appreciably in societies that demand personal responsibility and conformity to the rules of civilized behavior.

In recent years, 38 states have adopted "right to carry" laws, requiring police to issue full-carry pistol permits to all who meet simple criteria such as lack of a felony record. Despite the dire predictions of prominent Chicken Littles, most of these states actually saw drops in crime.

A society that wishes to remain democratic can never allow the behavior of the antisocial to determine the boundaries of its rights. Doing so can undermine the free society that Officer Stewart and others like him gave their lives to defend.

Police Chiefs oppose off-duty police using guns

I wonder whether this change in policy has anything to do with letting off duty police carry guns when they travel. Last year congress finally passed a law letting off police carry guns when they travel and police chiefs were opposed to it. They didn't mind their own police carrying guns, but it seemed to be a problem when others did so.

So now, the 20,000-member International Association of Chiefs of Police has called for off-duty officers who witness a crime to call for assistance rather than pulling a weapon.

Yet another person pretending to be me

A link to the posting can be found here.

I appreciate being emailed about this.

Latest Gallup Poll shows that 42 percent of Americans Households Own Guns

Just an insignificant 1 percent increase in the rate that households own guns over Gallup's 2000 survey

The poll, conducted Oct. 13-16, finds that 4 in 10 Americans report they have a gun in their homes, including 30% who say they personally own a gun and 12% who say another member of their household owns it. These results show essentially no change since this question was last asked in 2000. At that time, 27% of Americans said they personally owned a gun and 14% said another household member owned one.

Certain groups of Americans -- men, older Americans, Midwesterners, Southerners, Republicans, and whites -- are more likely than other groups to say they personally own a gun.

Judge Jack Weinstein lets New York City's suit against the gun industry go forward

Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein lets New York City's suit against the gun industry go forward. That Weinstein found this is hardly surprising. There is an exception for these suits if the gun companies have violated state or federal law in selling the guns, but I can't seem to find exactly what law they are said to have violated. As far as I can tell, simply claiming that gun makers have "dumped" guns on the market so that criminals will eventually get them doesn't qualify.

What is going on this week at the NY Post?

The NY Post is still one of my favortite newspapers, but I am not sure what is going on this week at the NY Post regarding guns (see here and here). The NY Post has always been the one New York City newspaper that was willing to provide a different perspective on the gun issue.

Incorrect claims about the data in More Guns, Less Crime

I have received an email comparing my work to that of Steve Levitt's regarding claimed coding errors in More Guns, Less Crime. Of course, this discussion is not very accurate.

1) There are no coding errors in the data used in “More Guns, Less Crime.” The book used crime data from 1977 to 1996, and as far as I know, no academics have claimed that there were any coding errors in that data. An interesting and useful Stanford Law Review article by Plassmann and Whitley added an additional four years to the data and the problem arose in this additional data. Overall, less than 200 cells out of 7.5 million cells were accidentally left blank. More important, the results that Plassmann and Whitley noted were the results which they thought were the correct ones were not affected at all by this minor change in the data.

2) I had put the data set on my website as a favor to Plassmann because it was very large and he did not have the ability to put it up for people to download. The data was corrected as soon as the missing cells were discovered and it was available for people to download. A note was added to the site to alert people to the correction. While I had helped them out on their paper, I let Plassmann and Whitley make their own statements about their results. My website reported the regressions in the same way that I had done them in all my previous estimates.

3) In statements here and here, I have discussed what was involved in Levitt's errors. The regressions where they left out the fixed effects were essentially the only ones that were at all useful in testing their hypothesis because they were the only ones that didn't require large degrees of aggregation to get to their "effective abortion rate" that were related to total murder rates in a state. The work that I did with Whitley directly related the age of the murder to the number of abortions when that murderer was born.

Thanks to Bob Thomas for his email.

9-year-old child uses toy gun to scare off criminals in South Africa

The bravery of a nine-year-old boy who rescued his grandmother from armed robbers and scared them off using his toy gun has been recognised by the police, who on Tuesday gave him a “hero” award.

Michael-Lee Ellington, a pupil at Arcadia Primary School, was honoured in front of his schoolmates when Inspector Owen Musiker of Sunnyside police station handed him an award in the school hall.

Looking on proudly – and gratefully – was his grandmother Marjorie, with whom he lives in a flat in Pretorius Street, Arcadia. . . .

Shortly after she was tied up for a second time, Michael-Lee knocked on the door. To his surprise two armed men opened the door and dragged him in, with one of the men placing his hand over the boy's mouth to prevent him from screaming.

Michael-Lee said: “I knew I had to do something, so I bit his hand hard and he let go of me. I quickly grabbed my toy gun and started shouting at them. They ran out of the flat, taking off with my granny's belongings, including her camera.”

Marjorie said she was surprised and relieved at her grandson's bravery. After the men fled, she removed the tape from her mouth. . . .

There are a few points to make. I am not sure that such a story could occur in the US because of all the regulations on how toy guns look here. In addition, I am not sure how much longer this could go on at in South Africa because legitimate gun ownership continues to be forced down dramatically by the government, it will be harder to convince criminals that the toy gun is real. Finally, I wonder whether a child like this would ever receive such a reward. In my book, The Bias Against Guns, I discuss multiple cases where young children used real guns to save lives and those cases got little publicity and no rewards were given out as far as I can tell.

Thanks to Walter E. Williams for sending this to me.

More on Levitt from Clayton Cramer

Clayton Cramer has a quote from an academic about Steve Levitt's recent problems.