In our limited abridged coverage over the last 2 weeks we recently touched on the explosion of violent crime in the city of Toronto, Ontario. There, the number of murders has doubled since last year, though still far less than comparable US cities. Many of these murders have been committed using firearms, a point that was not lost on the Canadian prime minister, who argued that the increase in crime was a direct result of loose guns laws in the United States.

Paul Martin argued that America was exporting a culture of gun violence. From that statement there is one truth and one farce. In the first place it should be noted that America is without question one of the most violent countries in the industrialized world. While compared to countries like Brazil or Russia, our crime rate is relatively low, but when compared with our neighbor to the north or Japan or Britain we have an astronomical crime rate, that is the shame of this country. There are numerous causes for high levels of crime, liberals will naturally blame “societal factors” such as poverty or limited social services, a conclusion that has no basis in fact given that countries with far greater disparities between rich and poor and far greater numbers of people living in poverty have much lower crime rates. Conservatives blame the justice and penal system, but this too is not the answer. The cause is a culture of permissiveness and a society, which increasingly shirks moral responsibility.

In this sense, the prime minister is correct. The prime minister is mistaken, however, in arguing that high crime rates in Canada are due to American access to guns and its culture. Indeed, violence in America was far more prevalent in the 1970s and 80s than it is today and the crime rate was much higher, at the same time access to guns was far greater, yet there was no subsequent spill over in violence in Canadian cities. Why? Because this has not been and is not the cause of Canada’s crime problem.

As some Canadians, like John Thompson with the Mackenzie Institute, have pointed out, blaming the Americans is a convenient diversion, which distracts from the real problem of gangs on Canadian streets. In realty the government in Canada has ignored this growing threat while continuing to take a soft line, vis-à-vis crime and as a result the problem has been allowed to fester to the point where it is now spilling over into Canadian streets with deadly results. Toronto police have admitted that gangs have become a real problem, with over 70 street gangs identified by police authorities. As long as the US and Canada are neighbors, look for the Canadians to blame any serious problem on the United States, rather than own up to the harsh realities of their own problems.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-01-02-toronto-guns_x.htm