Had some trouble accessing this Rosie, didn't want to lose it by your newspaper purging it from the website: Hope its ok...
When domestic violence turns deadly in Canada, killers are far more likely to reach for a knife than a gun.
However impetuously spouse-on-spouse homicide may occur — such murders are rarely plotted before the fatal eruption of rage — the weapon of choice is usually as close to hand as a kitchen drawer.
A female, four times more often than a male the victim in spousal homicide, will probably be stabbed, not shot by a long gun, the firearm that is again at the centre of a rural-versus-urban divide over Canada’s polarizing gun registry.
These figures have remained consistent since Statistics Canada first began tracking the too-long-ignored phenomenon of domestic murder. In 1995, the year Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s government passed the new Canadian Firearms Act — with its included gun registry requirement — 71 women across the country were slain by their intimate partners, a dozen of them by a rifle or shotgun. Sixteen were knifed to death, 12 strangled, six clubbed by a blunt instrument, six shot with handguns and other lives variously extinguished by poisoning, cutting with an instrument other than a knife, or set on fire.
In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, nine women were killed by a long gun (one by a handgun, a weapon not legally licensed to most Canadian civilians, though easily obtained by street criminals seeking fire power), 15 stabbed and eight strangled.
Spousal homicide in general, whether male on female or female on male, has been steadily declining for three decades. In 1995 there were 93 murders; in 2008 there were 62. One is still too many, obviously, but the trend does suggest that men and women are becoming less hotheaded or lethally explosive on the home front, at least with each other. This could be attributable to public education about domestic violence, earlier intervention in volatile relationships or partners wisely removing themselves from a potentially dangerous situation before the point of no return. And maybe women are making better choices about the men to whom they make a wedded or common law commitment.
Yet there’s nothing in the research to support the argument that the registration of long guns is saving women’s lives — a fallacy championed by many fearful the billion dollar registry will be scrapped when put to the vote Sept. 22 in the House of Commons on a backbencher Conservative private member’s bill.
There may be good reasons for maintaining the 15-year-old registry, however faulty and unwieldy it’s been in the application, but as legislated bulwark to safeguard the lives of vulnerable women is not one of them, any more than accidental discharge can be prevented by a duly logged and properly provenanced firearm.
It’s a misleading and dramatically overwrought hypothesis.
If the theory is that having a long gun in the house puts women at risk because some combustible guy will use it in a moment of blind fury, that opportunity would exist whether the weapon is registered or not. If not a shotgun because that individual has been refused a licence after a background check, or because he has turned over the firearm rather than cooperate with the system as it now exists, then he will seize on something else to commit the crime, whether a knife, a baseball bat or his bare hands.
Women die in domestic confrontations because they are usually smaller, weaker and unable to defend themselves. Ironically, a shotgun in a woman’s hands is a great equalizer.
To remove the offending article, or simply make it more bureaucratic to possess, doesn’t render the assailant any less deadly. That assumption may feel right, virtuous, but it lacks both logic and evidentiary basis.
We all want to protect lives, particularly those lost so senselessly to a moment of frenzied and irrational thought. We think we can impose buffers on violence by limiting the things that kill, which are not merely the articles designed to kill.
The same well-intentioned assertion was passionately wielded in Toronto to justify erecting a costly suicide barrier on the Bloor Street viaduct: If you build it, they won’t jump. Critics who countered that people intent on killing themselves would simply find another means — perhaps leaping from the nearby Leaside Bridge — were drowned out. Yet that’s precisely what happened. An academic study published this year showed there’d been no change in the average number of jumper suicides in Toronto pre- and post-barrier.
Facts and realities will likely not influence the upcoming Parliamentary vote which, with some rural NDP members now signalling a reversal of intentions — from opposing to supporting the registry’s continuation — might yet lead to the bill’s defeat.
It’s a trigger issue, deeply emotional for its symbolic substance if nothing else.
Just don’t pretend that the lives of women hang in the balance of a gun registry’s fate. They’ll still be on the knife’s edge of spousal murder.
