Gun Control Working Well in Canada

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Originally Posted by StriderKyo

I don't think anybody ever said anything like that. There have been school shootings before, and at a college on Monteal no less. There are legal and illegal guns in this country, and you can't prevent people from being insane and using them.

But guns aren't part of the culture the same way they are in the states. There's nothing in the Charter of Rights & Freedoms about being entitled to them. There's no powerful gun lobby like the NRA.

And the difference is more than just a gap between 30 million people and 300 million. In 2004 there were 172 gun related homicides in Canada. In the US there were 28,564.

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That's still an amazingly small percentage of americans.

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Originally Posted by the article The Meach linked

As it stands, border guards are supposed to allow anyone suspected of being armed and dangerous into Canada and then call police.

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I still think this is one of the funniest things I have ever read.

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Originally Posted by avatar

That's still an amazingly small percentage of americans.

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I thought it was more. Don't we have like ten times as many car wrecks?

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Originally Posted by buttcheeks

I thought it was more. Don't we have like ten times as many car wrecks?

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That's because, despite what the news wants you to believe, violent gun crimes have been steadily decreasing in the United States over the past decade.

Some may attribute this to some politicians crime bills...others may attribute it to violent videogames allowing children to act out their rage. I personally attribute it to natural selection...all the idiots who pull guns have been shot by now, and the ones who havent are part of the million or so people incarcerated in US jails right now, so they can't breed new ones.

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Originally Posted by NeoZeedeater

Now, this is sensible and true.


That depends on what freedoms you value more. Both the US and Canada have freedom of expression and association in their constitutions. Where they differ is that the US has the right to bear arms there in writing while Canada's says the government has no place in the bedrooms of consenting adults(in the US, individual states can make sodomy illegal for example).

So, I would say the countries are close to equal in freedom. Personally, I think the drug laws are archaic and anti-freedom in both countries though.

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Don't forget the freedom to not foot the bill via taxes for everyone else's problems, we have that to a dwindling degree in America too.

what the hell are you talking about

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Originally Posted by buttcheeks

what the hell are you talking about

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I don't have to pay for your health care or higher education. Not as much as I would in Canada anyway.

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Originally Posted by Error

That's because, despite what the news wants you to believe, violent gun crimes have been steadily decreasing in the United States over the past decade.

Some may attribute this to some politicians crime bills...others may attribute it to violent videogames allowing children to act out their rage. I personally attribute it to natural selection...all the idiots who pull guns have been shot by now, and the ones who havent are part of the million or so people incarcerated in US jails right now, so they can't breed new ones.

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Most of the people in US jails (and its like 2.x million) are nonviolent drug offenders. Which is a whole other can of worms.

No matter what Michael Moore or the Beeb wants to tell you, the US isn't full of gun-toting militias fronting around suburbia (unless it's a SWAT team, I guess). From what I know, the vast, vast majority of the gun crime happens in inner cities and ghettos. Gang-related and drug deal related. That's the root cause (and, more deeply, broken schools and corrupt cops and a broken safety net for these areas), not a gun-crazy culture or some nonsense.

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Originally Posted by SpoDaddy

I don't have to pay for your health care or higher education. Not as much as I would in Canada anyway.

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We spend more, way way way more, than Canada per capita on health care, and there is still almost 25% of the country that doesn't get any coverage at all. Our system doesn't work.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

We spend more, way way way more, than Canada per capita on health care, and there is still almost 25% of the country that doesn't get any coverage at all. Our system doesn't work.

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We spend more per capita but the quality of the health care is also better. That's the tradeoff-socialized health care means higher taxes and reduced quality, private health care means higher insurance premiums, some people can't afford it, but those that can get far better service.

I pay $400/month for health insurance, I'm happier with that than I would be if I was paying an extra $4800/year in taxes so everyone could have sub-par health care.

Good point about the gun violence; if you take ghettos that have practically been abandoned by the police out of the equation, American gun deaths are really low.

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Originally Posted by SpoDaddy

We spend more per capita but the quality of the health care is also better. That's the tradeoff-socialized health care means higher taxes and reduced quality, private health care means higher insurance premiums, some people can't afford it, but those that can get far better service.

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Not really, our country is ranked pretty low on things like birth mortality rate and life expectancy among other industrialized medicine. What has really happened is that medical service in the US has chased the money - the exotic, new, wildly expensive treatments are way above the rest of the world, but the basic, no-frills, routine stuff that everyone will likely need at some point in their life has fallen behind. When you consider that most of that exotic stuff is unproven and the difference it may make is negligible, I repeat myself: our system is broken. There's a good bok on this if you care, called Money-Driven Medicine by Maggie Mahar. Came out a few months ago.

Of course, there's also the philosophical point of whether medical care, like plasma TVs or something, should be out of reach of poor people in the richest country the world has ever seen.