Elizabeth
let me get this straight you would rather carrie a cell phone that take 3 seconds to dail 911 anouther 4 seconds to ring at least 3 seconds to scream help and then anywere from 5 min to an hour for the cops to figure out where you are and the get to you?

so at the min your looking at 6 minets for a cop to get to you and thats if hes/shes around the corner

most likly it will be around half an hour

Insted of a small hand gun that you can use in under 3 seconds with practic?
and guess what you just made the world a safer place by shooting your attacker because chances are thats one less bad guy.

looks like a win win to me

“eleven of the forty-nine homicides [In 2005] were a result of firearms (twenty-two percent)”

So only 22% homicides were related in any way to firearms, but you think this is plenty of justification to take them away from people? What about the other 78%? Should we outlaw kitchen knives? Baseball bats? Fists? Obviously these items are a bigger threat than firearms, since they resulted in 3 times as many deaths.

To quote you again…

“These statistics illustrate the need for gun control not only to reduce and prevent domestic violence, but violence in general.”

I’m sorry but that’s completely untrue. Guns are not the cause of any of this violence. The cause is that people want to be violent. A victim will be just as dead if their attacker uses a knife or a hammer.

Consider this: try to imagine how many guns are legally owned by citizens of this country. Now try to guess how many of those guns have ever been used in a crime. Or how many of those gun owners have ever committed a violent crime. The percentage is extraordinarily small. As in far less than 1%. But still you support punishing all of those LEGAL gun owners for the misdeeds of a few criminals. You’re ignoring all other factors in those domestic violence cases and focusing only on one thing because it happens to be one thing that you don’t like. Did you even consider the possibility of mental illness or psychological conditions? What about financial or marital problems? You need to address what caused the crime, not the manner in which the crime was committed.

Stop trying to punish me for something someone else did.

If you have proof the NRA funds pro gun candidates and organizations then PRODUCE IT.

IIRC Tony Bernardo with the Canadian Shooting Sports Association is on record saying the CSSA receives NO FUNDING from the NRA, and the only money they recieve from Americans is from those who wish to purchase memberships in the CSSA.

That information is available.

The RCMP, now responsible for the Canadian Firearms Center, has both the 2006 and 2007 Commissioner of Firearms Reports online.

The 2007 Report lists exactly 1,758 Firearms License revocations. Of those only 4 percent, or 70 license revocations, were due to domestic violence. At the end of 2007 there were 1,877,880 individuals licenses to own firearms in Canada. So, 0.0037% of firearms license owners had their licenses revoked as the result of domestic violence.

In 2006, there were 1,908,011 licensed firearms owners. Also in 2006, a total of 2,084 licenses were revoked.

While the 2007 report breaks down revocations into “violence” and “domestic violence” percentages the 2006 report lists only “violence”. If we – for lack of better numbers – assume the same proportion of domestic violence vs. violence revokations for 2006 as there were in 2007 that suggests 90-100 licenses were revoked. Or some 0.0049% of firearms owners lost their licenses due to cases of domestic violence.

In it’s report titled “Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile” Statistics Canada includes a breakdown of the weapons used during incidents of domestic violence in table 1.10 on page 24 of the report. In 2006 weapons were used in 2,534 of 38,573 reported cases. Firearms were used in 34 assaults on women, and 6 assaults on men. Statistics Canada also includes a percentage breakdown in the table – firearms are listed as 0%.

In reality they were used in 0.1% of cases.

The rate of “violence”, domestic violence being a subset of that, has been on a steady decline since the mid 1970′s. The current firearms act was not put in place until the late 90′s and still hasn’t fully come into force.

It has, however, been extremely costly, alienated a large percentage of the population, made criminals of some 5 million or so individuals that failed to obtain licenses as the firearms act required, and generally been a failure at registering firearms with some 5-10 million guns simply “disappearing” when the registry came into effect.

I would suggest that if foreign governments are going to use the Canadian Firearms Act in developing their own firearms control legislations it should be to use it as a roadmap on what not to do.

If anything, you’re the one that doesn’t understand the severity of the problem. That being, for every incident involving a firearm there are one-thousand incidents that involve knives, fists, etc.

I don’t disagree that firearms are used in cases of domestic violence. However having failed to provide any statistics that show how many of those firearms are owned by licensed gun owners you’ve failed to establish a causative link between firearms control legislation and domestic violence.

If anything, crime and domestic violence rates have been dropping since long before the current regime of firearms legislation was passed in Canada. Handguns, often blamed for most “gun violence” have been tracked in Canada since the mid-1930′s yet criminals seem to obtain them quite easily. Of course, it’s hardly an impossible task to smuggle them across the world’s longest undefended border.

Again, I fail to see a causative relationship between stricter gun laws and domestic violence rates. If you have evidence one exists I would be happy to review it.

Otherwise I believe that money spent harassing people who aren’t part of the problem would be better spent helping shelters like Interim Place not have to give women 2nd and 3rd hand clothes when they leave abusive relationships.