Banning handguns not the answer
Here's a question: since crime is illegal, why do we still have crime? What's that you say? We have crime because, well, some people are criminals. Dah! Which is why, of course, it would make as much sense for Toronto's left-leaning Mayor David Miller to demand a ban on crime as it does for him to ask Canadians to sign his online petition to ban handguns. It doesn't work. Period.

All it does is allow Miller - the mayor of the city with one quarter of all Canada's annual gun victims - to avoid concrete action and to slough off his responsibility by blaming Ottawa and Queen's Park. It also shifts the blame away from criminals onto the backs of millions of law-abiding Canadian gun owners.

I do not own a gun. Other than target practice with my high school army cadets - at a time when cadet training was mandatory - I've never even fired a gun.

Yet we need look no further than the United Kingdom to understand that handgun bans don't work. In June 1997, a year after the massacre in Dunblane - a small Scottish town where a man murdered 16 schoolchildren plus an adult before turning his guns on himself - British MPs voted 384 to 181 to ban all handguns in Britain.

Labor Home Secretary Jack Straw told the Commons, "I recognize there will be law-abiding shooters who will be inconvenienced or worse as a result, and I regret that. But I am in no doubt where the balance should be struck between the right to practice sport and the right to life - particularly the right to life of a child." Absolutely, IF gun bans worked. But, sadly, they don't.

Instead of gun crimes falling with the ban, they skyrocketed. On July 16, 2001 the BBC reported that the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent in the two years after the ban. Two years later, BBC reported that gun crime had risen by yet another 35 percent in the previous year alone. And so it goes.

There's more. In Canada, for example, guns of all descriptions accounted for 2.4 percent of the weaponry used in violent crimes (in Toronto, on Miller's continuing watch, it's 4.1 per cent, still small but nearly double the national average.) More to the point, however, knives accounted for 6.2 percent. A knife ban anyone? Even clubs and other blunt objects were the weapon of choice more often than a gun.

Statistics Canada reports that registered guns - and all handguns in Canada have had to be registered for the last six decades or so - were used in only 2.27 percent of Canadian homicides between 1997 and 2005 and legal gun owners were charged in a mere 1.2 percent of murders commited with a gun.

Yes, guns, when they are used, are more deadly than knives and clubs. But the thing is, they're being used by criminals who a)-do not have legally registered guns and b)-obviously have no intention of registering their guns whatever the law might say. Miller and his fellow travelers ignore the U.K. experience - where a gun ban exacerbated the problem - and point south to the U.S. where Americans love guns, and where the gun-related murder rate is 3.4 per 100,000 people, compared to .58 in Canada.

That's proof, they say, that gun bans would work. Not exactly.

Gun-related crime varies wildly in various parts of the U.S. and - dare we say it? -there is no direct relationship between the number of gun owners and the rate of gun crime. Don't believe it? Well, Washington, D.C., has far and away the highest gun-related murder rates in the U.S. (35.8 per 100,000), yet only 3.8 per cent of its citizens own guns. Contrast this with North Dakota, where the gun-related murder rate is 1.4 per 100,000 (well below Toronto's rate, incidentally) despite the fact that more than half the population owns at least one gun.

If Miller really wanted to tackle Toronto's gun problem - and it is a serious problem - he would look to New York City, where the NYPD and the local council introduced radical and aggressive policing tactics in 1993 - using felony arrests and summonses to target gun trafficking, targeting the high crime areas, and strictly enforcing all gun laws - and New York's gun-related crime and homicide rates plummeted from the worst in the U.S. to among the safest of the big cities.

Bans don't work. But stiff penalties and aggressive police actions do, which is essentially what federal Safety Minister Stockwell Day is trying to tell Miller. New York will tell anybody how they did it.

If Miller's main interest is reducing gun crime instead of garnering self-serving headlines and blaming other levels of government for his inaction, he should ask them.

He might learn something. And some young Toronto lives might be saved.