It’s odd. All four years I lived in the United States, I never witnessed a single gun crime. Within a week of being back in Canada, however, I was doing a late night Dairy Queen run with my buddy when these two hooligans (I won’t mention the ethnic background of the perpetrators since in Canada it’s a hate crime that could see me jailed longer than them) walked in with a shotgun. Of course, our strict gun control laws insured that they were the only two people armed throughout the holdup.
I later discovered from a police officer friend of mine (who told me off the record I should have stayed in the US) that armed robberies have become quite common in my hometown during the four years I was away. He felt a lot of it had to do with high taxes, high immigration and a sluggish economy. For those who don’t wanna stay on welfare, it’s easier to turn to crime than to find honest employment and keep enough of your paycheck after taxes. Additionally, with the police underfunded and their hands tied in many ways, most criminals are in and out of the system in no time.
The same has happened with gang violence in schools. Here’s a pretty nasty story that demonstrates why Michael “Bowling for Columbine” Moore, who claims that Canada is such a violence free society that we don’t lock our doors in major cities, should stick to his fairy tales about America and not try and invent them about the Mediocre White North as well: Attackers hacked at teen with machete
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Sounds scary, Pete. I’m sure MM would claim that your experience was a fluke. Stories like this one made me apply for a concealed carry permit years ago — I never want to have something like this happen in front of me, and be powerless to stop it.
I thought my apartment complex in Houston could be noisy occasionally, but I was surprised when I was staying in Yarmouth, NS, for a few days this summer. There were gangs of kids (15-18) wandering the streets at all hours, yelling, swearing, and threatening mischief to various cars parked on the side of the road. Every night there I was awakened at about 2:00 a.m. And I blogged around this time about various Canadian towns that were worried that curfews could be violations of the human rights of teenagers.
One symptom of the Culture of Death is that people lose their moral certitude, even on the most elementary matters. Thus they can’t even bring themselves to condemn outrages against the common good, whether they be petty crime or mass murder.
Pete et al,
Moore interviewed people in Windsor, Ontario, where I live with my wife and two children. By the way, by way of survey of and family, the population of Windsor was misrepresented by Moore’s poll (or at least the images he chose to show in Bowling for Columbine). I can tell you that I certainly lock my doors at night. In fact, one of the last rituals of the evening is to push the “Stay” button on my alarm system. You see, though Canada has many fewer violent crimes than the U.S. (per capita), it has a higher percentage of breakins and property damage.
The snow might be whiter on the other side, but not the grass.