Yorkton – Today, Garry Breitkreuz, MP for Yorkton-Melville, exposed another fallacy in the government’s claim that gun control laws reduce crime. "Why do ‘in-house’ studies conducted by the Department of Justice find that gun control laws are effective, while independent university studies find the opposite?" asked Breitkreuz. Could it be that Justice bureaucrats are putting the public policy priorities of their political masters ahead of the public safety priorities of the Canadian people?"

A recent research paper produced by Gary Mauser, Ph.D. and Dennis Maki, Ph.D. of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia prompted Breitkreuz to once again attack the government’s credibility on the firearms issue. Professor Mauser’s most recent paper, "An Evaluation of the 1977 Canadian Firearms Legislation: Robbery Involving a Firearm" was presented to the American Society of Criminology last November in Washington, D.C. The professors concluded: "The firearms control regime introduced by Canada in 1977 was not effective in reducing robberies, and may have acted perversely to increase armed robberies." Mauser and Maki explained, "The purpose of introducing a firearms control regime is to reduce, not increase violent crime. The 1977 legislation eliminated self-defence as a legitimate reason for owning a handgun, and the associated regulations made it difficult if not impossible to keep a handgun at a place of business. Thus, an unintended consequence of this legislation, other things being equal, may have been to increase the number of successful armed robberies (with or without firearms). Since criminals are motivated by self-preservation, they would be encouraged when they are informed by the media that the public has been disarmed."

"Why did it take independent university research to expose yet another fatal flaw in Canada’s gun control laws?" asked Breitkreuz. "What Canadians need to know now is how many more victims of robbery have there been as a result of these ‘unintended consequences’ of the government’s gun laws? How many robbery victims have been injured or killed in these government policy-induced robberies? Gun control advocates (including an Assistant Commissioner of the RCMP) naively state, "…if it saves just one life…" But what if gun control laws cost more lives than they save? It’s a question the government has never even asked, let alone tried to answer," fired Breitkreuz.

-30-

The Office of Garry Breitkreuz, M.P.