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Chris Selley in National Post today:

�Are we heading into more of a U.S.-style gun culture?� Wendy Mesley, hosting CBC�s The National, put that most Canadian of questions to her Sunday media panel, which was considering issues surrounding last week�s murder of three RCMP officers in Moncton. Panelist Adam Goldenberg responded in the affirmative.

�I think there is a degree of American-style gun culture already in Canada,� he said, citing the Conservative government�s scuppering of the long-gun registry. �I have actually been surprised about how muted the response has been to this Moncton incident among politicians and people who should be taking a line saying we need more gun control,� he added.

I too have been surprised by the muted reaction � pleasantly.

No question, people talked. With the alleged killer still at large, the National Firearms Association idiotically complained that �none of Canada�s firearms control efforts over the past 50 years have had any effect on preventing violence�; and CBC�s Power and Politics panel debated (among other things) the merits of the long-gun registry. The next day, an op-ed in the Toronto Star blamed the �U.S.-style mass shooting� on �the six-year war on gun control in Canada waged by Stephen Harper and Vic Toews.�

But hey, fish gotta swim. Gun nuts can be nutty, hence the name; there�s all manner of wackadoo stuff in the Star�s op-ed pages; and CBC wouldn�t have the first clue how to analyze a tragedy if it couldn�t suggest a lack of legislation might be to blame. All in all I would say the reaction has been appropriately sober. MPs of all stripes declined to take reporters� bait. I feel like I�ve seen more articles claiming the murders have �reignited the gun control debate� than I�ve seen people actually reigniting the gun control debate.

If I were to wax optimistic, I might argue Canadians are beginning to face reality: Legislation has no magical powers to prevent these atrocities � certainly not legislation imposing a minor procedural requirement like a long-gun registry; and gun violence is not getting worse in Canada, let alone approaching the dreaded �U.S.-style� designation. It�s getting better.

Canada�s homicide rate in recent years has been just slightly higher than it was in the rose-tinted early 1960s, and half of what it was at its peaks in the late 1970s and early 1990s. In recent years Canada�s rate of homicide by gun has been just over half what it was in the mid-1970s, when Statistics Canada�s records begin. The total number of deaths caused by firearms fell from 2.8 per 100,000 population in 2000 to 1.94 in 2011 � thanks in large part to a significant drop in suicides by gun (though the overall suicide rate has unfortunately stayed relatively constant).

And guess what? Not that you�re likely to have heard about it, but the U.S.-style trend is much the same. The peak year for firearm deaths and firearm homicides in the United States � 15.2 and 7 per 100,000 population, respectively � was 1993 (a year that saw no particularly deadly mass murders, incidentally). In the ensuing few years those rates plummeted to 10.3 and 3.8, respectively, and have remained roughly at that level ever since.

Fully 56% thought gun crime had gone up over the previous 20 years; only 10% thought it had gone down
Americans are almost totally oblivious to this, the Pew Research Center reported last month under the apt title �Gun homicide rate down 49% since 1993 peak; public unaware.� Fully 56% thought gun crime had gone up over the previous 20 years; only 10% thought it had gone down.

In the months after the atrocity at Connecticut�s Sandy Hook Elementary School, it was often noted that vastly more Americans had since died, unnoticed, from gunshots. These were valuable and powerful reminders of the scope of the problem. It was less often noted that this was nowhere near a historic body count � and understandably so, to a great extent. Americans still die from gunshots far more than residents of comparable countries. It�s a huge public health issue that desperately needs addressing.

The risks associated with Americans� misperceptions are significant, however. There is the excessive stress and worry, passed from parents to children � pointlessly locked schools (like poor Sandy Hook) and futile lockdown drills, to say nothing of the ghoulish market in bulletproof school supplies. And I suspect it might be worse than that.

The American situation puts the lie to the magic thinking of Canada�s gun control obsessives
The number of American households containing a gun is certainly not at a historic high: Gallup most recently pegged it at 37%, down from 51% in the mid-1990s; the University of Chicago�s General Social Survey most recently had it at 34%, down from 54% in the late 1970s. But we know that many Americans believe in the protective power of firearms. After Sandy Hook, while liberals again deluded themselves that the moment for Canadian-style gun control was finally at hand, polls showed majority support for the National Rifle Association�s call for an armed guard in every school. Over the past 15 years, Pew�s polling shows protection trading places with hunting as the main reason Americans own guns. If only one in 10 Americans has an accurate perception of the actual trend in gun crime, it stands to reason they may be buying more guns than they would otherwise. And where there are guns, there is always the potential for guns to go off � deliberately, accidentally, whatever.

Gun control, in the broad sense, pretty obviously works. Fewer guns are correlated with fewer gun deaths. But the American situation puts the lie to the magic thinking of Canada�s gun control obsessives. It�s not about registering hunting rifles or reclassifying a certain gun as Very Very Dangerous instead of Very Dangerous. Over the past 20 years, the broad trend in gun violence, and indeed all violence, has been a continent-wide phenomenon: a peak in the mid-1990s, a quick plummet, a plateau. You see it in Canada, with its tough gun control, and in the United States, with its lenient gun control. You see it in New York, with its tough gun control, and you see it in Arizona, with its lenient gun control. The only question is how high up the chart the line plummets and plateaus.

Pew�s report summarizes the oft-cited reasons for this: an aging population; the end of the crack wars that drove crime up in the 1990s; maybe even abortion on demand (fewer neglected children) or the banning of lead paint (fewer brain-damaged children). But the overall message is this: Societies reduce gun violence by reducing all violence; and societies reduce violence by making themselves better, in every conceivable sense. Reasonable people will disagree on how to do that. But reasonable people should be able to agree that screaming at each other over whether or not to maintain a list of hunting rifles and their owners is not going to save a great many lives. Maybe we�re finally getting there."

National Post

To which I will add, Canadians generally don't take offence to those who believe one way or the other. They deplore as uncivil the demonization, the insults, characterization of those who think differently as lesser persons, as some do here. Partisanship is an element of citizenship. The other does no good.