Let’s blame Dalton for gun crime
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
We all saw the headlines last week based on the latest StatsCan report.
“Gang killings on rise: Stats” — Toronto Sun.
“Ontario’s homicide rate up” — Toronto Star.
“Gangs spark rise in Canadian gun deaths” — Globe and Mail.
Sadly, last year’s record spike in gang shootings in Toronto helped drive up the national rate of gun carnage.
I say it’s time to put the blame where it belongs — on Premier Dalton McGuinty.
These thugs can rightly be called “McGuinty’s children.”
Upon taking office in 2003, McGuinty tossed out years of crime-fighting policies developed by the previous Mike Harris Conservative government to make our schools safer and encourage families to get off welfare and back into the labour force.
The result was dramatic. After a few years of Harris’ policies, Ontario had the lowest crime rate of any province, the Toronto area the lowest crime rate of any major urban centre. Harris’ cuts to welfare, his workfare policies designed to encourage people to lead productive lives and his Safe Schools Act mandating zero tolerance for violence in schools, clearly resulted in less crime.
But then McGuinty and the Liberals tossed aside these initiatives.
McGuinty denounced the Safe Schools Act, sending a message to young urban terrorists they had nothing to fear from him. He endorsed useless ideas such as banning handguns.
The result was predictable. Gang-related shootings skyrocketed in 2005, less than two years after McGuinty took power.
Got all that? Good. Now forget it, because it’s horse manure.
But it’s no bigger a pile of manure than that served up by the Toronto Star, Mayor David Miller, Police Board Chairman Alok Mukherjee and various left-wing activists, commentators and academics who last year blamed the spike in gang-related shootings in Toronto on Harris’ policies, some even describing the killers as “Harris’ children.”
If that was true, we would expect this year’s violence to be at least as bad, if not worse.
But gun violence in Toronto is down.
Spewing nonsense
Here’s the reality, as opposed to all that nonsense spewed last year about “Harris’ children.” We don’t know why crime rates vary from year to year. To study the issue seriously, you have to look, without a pre-conceived bias, at trends over decades.
Simply assuming that because one thing happened (Harris’ or McGuinty’s election) and then another thing happened (gun killings spiked in 2005), that the first led to the second, is called confusing correlation with causation. It’s also called junk science.
In the chapter on crime in his bestseller, Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt notes that no one predicted the drop in crime that started in the U.S. in the early 1990s.
Based on his statistical analysis, Levitt concludes three things largely responsible were — hiring more cops, longer prison terms and, most controversially, the increased availability of abortion beginning in the early 1970s.
Levitt argued that meant generations of young people who would have disproportionately turned to crime in their teenage years because they would have come from poor, single-parent families, were never born.
That theory has provoked huge controversy. Other experts have challenged his research.
Regardless of who’s right, the lesson with statistics, as Thomas Sowell writes in his book, The Vision of the Anointed, is that: “When there is a substantial correlation between A and B, this might mean that: (1) A causes B. (2) B causes A. (3) Both A and B are the results of C or some other combination of factors. (4) It is a coincidence.”
But don’t tell the Star and Co. After all, it’s much more fun to pull theories out of your butt based on your biases and pretend you know what you’re talking about.
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