From: Boris Gimbarzevsky Date: Thu, 07 Dec 1995 11:08:14 -0600 (CST) Subject: New gun numbers - best evidence so far that Rock's a liar It's a good thing that I didn't send my newest investigation of Canadian gun numbers to the cdn-firearms mailing list yesterday since today I found a document, which if true, proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Mr Rock has deliberately decieved parliament and the Canadian people. This document is entitled: "Statistics relating to the gun control question" and was produced byt the Ministry of the Solicitor General, Research & Statistics Development Branch, Ottawa March 1976. (A copy is available in the UBC Law library - call # KN 186.1 C352 1976). Henceforth I will refer to this document as MOSG, or MOSG (1976). For those who don't want to wade through data, this document contains an estimate of the MINIMUM total gun stocks in Canada based on a number of sources. For 1974 the number given by MOSG is 10,607,758. The number of firearms/capita in 1974 is estimated to be no less than 0.5 compared to 0.7 in the US using BATF estimates for 1975. If this level of ownership has persisted, there can be no fewer than 14,000,000 firearms in Canada today - very similar to the numbers I have been arriving at based on independant methods. I'll let those members of this mailing list who have a legal background decide whether this is sufficient evidence to initiate criminal proceedings against Stalin Rock, but the evidence, IMO, is quite a bit stronger when I first suggested this option in a previous posting containing analysis of the lies contained in the report entitled "The Illegal Movement of Firearms in Canada" released on 19 May 1995. I'll follow the logic of the authors of MOSG report to give those readers who are unlikely to ever see the original how damning the evidence against Mr Rock is. I am curious how many copies of this report are in existence - I first became aware of it on reading Stenning and Moyer (1981). There are some discrepancies which are still unsettling, and perhaps Gary Mauser and Taylor Buckner could provide their opinions as I'm sure they've reviewed the literature in this area having carried out their own Canadian gun ownership surveys. MOSG (1976) is organized as a series of questions with answers. The initial question is: "How many guns are there in Canada, and what proportion of these are handguns, rifles and shotguns?" They answer this question taking the average of numbers obtained by two approaches: (1) "summing estimated volumes of imports and domestic production that have occurred during the 20th century"..."and produce a final estimated minimum gun stock of 10,029,369 for 1974" (2) "By relating the growh of gun stock to the total population growth for the period in which hard data is available for both, and by projecting the ratio backwards over earlier years for which the population figures alone are available."..."This approach provides a minimum gun stock estimate of 11,186,148" In typical Canadian fashion, they assume that the real number must be a compromise of these two values, and give their estimate as 10,607,758 guns in Canada in 1974. These firearms are broken down as follows (using the higher estimate from (2) above): Type of gun Estimated N Percent Pistols 717,189 6.4 Rifles 6.651,946 59.5 Shotguns 3,817,013 34.1 ------------------------------- Total 11,186,148 The authors note that these estimates do not take into account the influence of such factors as "smuggling into and out of Canada, military gun stocks, illegal manufactures, and firearms destroyed, rendered inoperable or now obsolete." Their next question is: "What is the annual increase in the gun stock" What they do is to look at the influence of population growth, roughly 2.2% yearly in the early 1970's and increase in volume of imports and domestic manufacturing, roughly 5% yearly. Their procedure of taking the arithmetic mean of two percentages to arrive at an increase of 4% is mathematically invalid. It is perhaps better to look at the raw data which is given in response to their next question: "Where do the different kinds of guns in Canada come from? What are the trends?" Here they give hard data on numbers of guns imported and manufactured. Shotguns Rifles Pistols Total Year Imports Domestic Imports Domestic Imports * Imports Domestic 1970 51,227 84,000 81,469 48,000 13,975 146,671 132,000 1971 55,984 90,000 76,604 51,000 24,305 156,893 141,000 1972 80,033 104,000 111,332 73,000 37,643 229,008 177,000 1973 105,650 141,000 108,093 81,000 22,475 236,218 222,000 1974 79,015 140,000 124,643 112,000 28,408 232,066 252,000 - -----------------------+------------------+----------+-------------------- Total 371,909 559,000 502,141 365,000 126,806 1,000,856 924,000 * No pistols were manufactured in Canada during the interval 1970 to 1974. The data above is extremely damning to the position of Mr Rock and his sycophants. In a five year period, at least 1.924 MILLION firearms were added to Canadian stocks. Domestic production was close to 1 million firearms yearly. Unless there has been an equally large export of firearms from Canada, or a high rate of firearms destruction, it seems virtually impossible for the number of firearms to decrease to the 6 million that Mr Rock insists are the current Canadian gun stock. Source of this data is given as: Imports: External trade division, Statistics Canada Domestic Manufactures: The Canadian firearms industry. One could get more recent data from these sources to find out what the trend has been since 1974. I would suspect that if there has been any decrease in growth, it has occurred since 1991 when C-17 was introduced. Looking at the ratio of known numbers of firearms gives; Type of gun Estimated N Percent Pistols 126,806 6.6 Rifles 867,141 45.0 Shotguns 930,909 48.4 ------------------------------- Total 1,924,856 Interestingly, the number of pistols imported over this 5 year period is almost the same as the number in the population (6.4%). Shotguns are over-represented among new firearms making up 48.4% of new firearms from 1970-1974 compared to their 34.1% presence in the existing firearms stock. I don't know how large of an export market there was for Canadian shotguns, but the bulk of imported ones were almost certainly going into private hands. Next MOSG asks: "How does gunstock stack up against the total population?" They note: "There is about one gun for every two Canadians, and this relationship has not changed much over years". Year Pop/1000 Persons/Gun 1960 17,870 2.6 1970 21,277 2.32 1971 21,568 2.28 1972 21,830 2.23 1973 22,095 2.17 1974 22,446 2.11 If we assume that the same ration of persons/gun that held in 1974 still held today, then we would get ~13.74 million firearms in Canada. As this ratio was decreasing fairly quickly, it is likely that the 20 million firearms figure I have seen attributed to the NFA is well within the confidence limits of these various estimates. Next, "How does the Canadian stock of guns compare with that in the United States, especially for handguns?" Data for US gunstock estimates was obtained from BATF estimates of 1/1/1975. Estimate for number of unregistered Canadian handguns is given as "RCMP Parliamentary inquiry 2533 dated 22/5/75, and is 50,000 in addition to the 644,481 handguns registered with the RCMP on 1/2/76 for a total of 694,481. Total Gunstock USA Canada Approx # of firearms 135,000,000 10,000,000 Approximate population 200,000,000 20,000,000 Firearms per capita 0.7 0.5 Total Handgun Stock USA Canada Approx # of handguns 40,000,000 700,000 Approximate population 200,000,000 20,000,000 Firearms per capita 0.2 0.04 This table demonstrates that there is little difference in the total number of firearms owned by Americans and Canadians - the differences in firearms ownership patterns are almost entirely due to the higher proportion of pistols owned by Americans. When one considers only rifles and shotguns, Canadians and Americans have virtually identical rates of firearm ownership; especially in western Canada. When this report attempts to estimate the number of firearm owners in Canada, it gives values which suggest that the average firearm owner has at least 5 guns. MOSG asks: "How many people in Canada own guns, and how are they distributed?" They note that estimates range from 2-3 million depending on who one asks. They provide a number of different estimates from the following sources: (1) Households - relating market suvery data on households possessing guns to data on households age and sex composition (2) Gunstock - relating estimated gun stock to industry perceptions of the number of guns/owner (3) Hunters licences - relating estimated number of individuals to who hunters licenses are issues to percieved total gun-owning universe. They perform the dubious process of averaging the three estimates which are: Estimate Owners/1000 (1) 2,000 (2) 2,100 (3) 1,800 They take the average of 2 million as how many gun owners there are in Canada. These estimates should be compared with the detailed survey carried out in 1976 by Stenning and Moyer (1981) (S&M in table below): Region MOSG S&M Atlantic 229,899 305,000 Quebec 473,078 537,000 Ontario 684,240 742,000 Prairies 416,821 593,000 BC 240,151 285,000 ------------------------------ Total 2,044,189 2,462,000 The values from S&M are based on an interview of 30,000 households carried out in 1976. It is clear that the MOSG estimate of 2 million gun owners is an underestimate - it is regrettable that the MOSG doesn't provide confidence estimates for any of its values, but I would guess that there was quite a large error in this estimate. Based on the best data available to us, we have an estimate of some 2.5 million gun owners and some 11 million guns in Canada in 1976. What I find inexplicable is how S&M obtained a total of 5.168 million privately owned firearms which represents 0.25 guns/person, not the 0.5 calculated by MOSG. One is disinclined to believe the figures of S&M when they obtain a value of only 284,000 privately owned pistols whereas in 1976 the RCMP have a total of 644,481 handguns registered. I can't say whether this discrepancy is due to deliberate under-reporting of firearms ownership, or a data processing error by Stats Canada. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who could shed some light on this subject. One can check whether the stocks of pistols have increased at the same rate as the 25,361 yearly rate from 1970-1975. If it had, one would expect an additional 355,057 pistols in the 14 year period from 1976 to 1990 to give a total of 999,538 pistols in 1990. The 1990 Annual Firearms report from the RCMP gives 947,072 restricted weapons as being registered in 1990. During that year, there were: 32,326 - new restricted weapons registered for the first time 18,976 - transfers of restricted weapons between owners (sales) (9,379)- withdrawn from circulation. 22,947 - increase in restricted weapon numbers from 1989. The 1990 data suggests that, at least for pistols, a yearly rate of increase not much less than that found in 1976 had been occurring over the intervening 14 years. I won't post a detailed analysis of S&M here (I've posted a preliminary analysis to can.talk.guns). What is necessary now is to compile all of this data into a more compact format, and, if possible add firearms importation and production figures for the years from 1976 onwards. This data should be readily available, but I won't be able to do this alone. Anyone who has access to such data could e-mail it to me, and I'll put it all together. The more I look into this question, the more damning the evidence against Rock becomes - one is reminded of the worst excesses of Soviet propoganda in his misuse of government communications resources to distribute lies to the public. Every calculation I perform leads to an estimate of an absolute minimum of 10 million and a more probable estimate of some 15 million firearms in Canada. MOSG (1976) and S&M both indicated that their estimates were absolute minimum numbers and that the number of firearms was likely significantly greater than the values they published. The absence of confidence intervals on their data is most suspicious, but doesn't seem to bother Rock's followers who misuse or ignore this data. A discrepancy of 5 million firearms between MOSG and S&M should lead to a detailed investigation to ascertain the source of the problem - no such effort appears to have been expended, and instead one gets numbers which are so clearly at variance with the data that one cannot but conclude that the changing of historical facts in conflict with current ideology did not disappear along with the former Soviet Union. Boris Gimbarzevsky References Most given in body of text except for: Stenning P.C., Moyer, S. Firearms Ownership and Use in Canada: A Report of Survey Findings, 1976. Working paper of the Center of Criminology, University of Toronto. UofT press