re gun control was re we re mad as hell at the tv news in article c tr m eqw magpie linknet com manes magpie linknet com steve manes writes on the other hand we can draw lessons from neighbors who are more culturally similar namely the canadians i don t think such a canada is any more culturally similar to the united states than england in terms of laws regarding individual rights restrictions on police searches etc all closely related to crime canadian laws parallel england s and differ greatly from those of the united states in fact an exhaustive seven year study has already been done of the respective crime rates of vancouver british columbia and seattle washington cities with roughly the same population urban economy geography and crime but with decidedly different approaches to gun control actually they do not have roughly the same urban economy and extremely different ethnic composition over the seven year study homicides occurred in seattle per vs homicides in vancouver per after adjustment for differences in age and sex among the populations the relative risk of being a victim of homicide in seattle as compared to vancouver was found to be however if you account for economic and ethnic differences the difference disappears completely seattle s minorities are predominatly poor while vancouver s are middle or upper class the rates for whites in both cities were found to be identicle while the rate for poor seattle minorities was almost three times as great as for the well to do minorities of vancouver the pattern seems to be one of poverty and race relations not one of gun control the authors of the report also investigated legally justifiable homicides self defense only such homicides occurred during the seven year study of which were committed by police only cases of civilians acting in self defense occurrred that is a gross distortion self defense does not mean killing the attacker there were cases of civilians killing their attacker in self defence but such cases represent less that of the crimes prevented by armed self defence for every case you cite there were over other cases of self defence where the crime was prevented but the attacker was not killed by the way is the most conservative possible figure based on the national crime survey s estimate of crimes prevented by armed self defence each year most other studies on the subject put the figure at to those figures would imply less than of sucessful self defences involve killing the attacker so more correctly there over possibly as many as cases of civilians acting in self defence only of which resulted in the death of the attacker this is a significant factor in comparison to the homicides if memory serves homicides make up approximately of the violent crimes the study considered so the fair comparison would be homicides prevented and homicides clearly the study can not be close to accurate since it ignored these cases of self defence frank crary cu boulder
