After Thoughts

It seems that I will need to do an 'After Thought' column once in a while to clear up some stuff from previous articles. I appreciate all of you who take the time to read my items and especially those of you who take the time to comment on what I've written. I've tried to make each article interesting and look forward to reading the comments, whether or not you agree with me. Many times I've been shown a point of view I hadn't considered and look at this as a way to gain knowledge and experience.

However, there are many comments which I reply to, and I do reply to them all, which fall on deaf ears as the commenter never comes back for a follow up. So, with that in mind, I offer the following.

Mr. Moon : Some time ago I wrote about gun control and said that gun registries didn't work in other countries and they wouldn't work here in Canada. You replied, "How come you say "banning guns didn't work in Britain or Australia" when the stats show much higher murder rates in America than in Britain or Australia. It's clear the American system is the one that does not work in regards to this."

Sorry to burst your bubble. It took me a while to find the stats and I apologize for the delay in relaying them to you but here goes. Britain banned civilian handguns nearly a decade ago. Since 1997, it has not been legal for ordinary Britons to own a handgun. Since the ban, handgun homicides have gone up, not down. In the six years prior to the ban, there was an average of 33 handgun murders a year in Britain. After the ban there has been an average of nearly 43, an increase of 30%. In the years since the handgun ban, violent crime in Britain has spiked and the streets of the major cities are awash in illegal guns smuggled in from abroad. By Scotland Yard's estimate, as many as 4 million illegal handguns have entered the U.K. in the past nine years. In Manchester, for example, police report an average of two firearms offences each day by 15- to 20-year-olds, alone. In most categories of firearms crimes other than murder, Britain is now more violent than the United States.

In Australia, following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people at a Tasmanian resort were killed, the national government banned most semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns. Nearly a million civilian guns were confiscated. Yet, while gun crimes in Australia are now noticeably lower than in 1996, shooting incidents actually rose by more than two-thirds in the five years after the government-imposed gun surrender. The Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BCSR) credits the dramatic gun crime decline since 2001 not to the gun ban, but to increased police efforts to interdict illegal gun shipments and prosecute owners of illegal weapons, notably drug dealers. Don Weatherburn, the head of the BCSR, sees no evidence "to be able to say that gun laws have had any effect."
You may have the market cornered on murder, but that is a small part of crimes committed with a gun.

Luke : I recently wrote an article about the differences between football and soccer. For whatever reasons, you got your knickers in a twist and sent the following, "Youranter: please learn how to spell and use proper grammar. EVERYTHING YOU WRITE IS RUINED BY TERRIBLE SPELLING. Good ideas and information is ruined." Blame it on a sticky keyboard, flog me for not catching it, but yes, I did spell football 'footbal' in the title. After you pointed out that little mistake to me, I thought most people could make the leap and figure out what I was on about. I didn't realize that you were from Denver and had several high school diplomas to your credit. Just out of curiosity, how many years did you have to attend high school to get these diplomas? I went once before moving on to higher education and wonder how someone could achieve the lofty goal of 'several diplomas' that are next to worthless in the working world.

Your spelling lesson for the day. In Canada, we spell some words differently than you do in the States. You may be the world's last superpower but you haven't conquered us yet, so don't assume yours is the only way to spell a word. With 'several high school diplomas' under your belt, surely you know this. We throw an extra 'u' into words such as favourite, honour, colour and neighbour. Of course you know the difference between 'yore', 'your' and 'you're' along with 'their', there' and 'they're', 'where', wear', and 'were' and 'to', too' and 'two'.

As for your claims to my grammar being incorrect, please give me some examples. I really don't know where you're coming from on this one. While it doesn't correct grammar, my spell- check tells me that I have spelled everything correctly. I use it as a check after I've written an article. An American spell-check I might add, that other than proper names and the above mentioned words finds nothing wrong with the way I spell.

I don't know why you yelled at me with your "EVERYTHING YOU WRITE IS RUINED BY TERRIBLE SPELLING" statement, but I'll chalk it up to you just having a bad day. I suppose that if I hadn't written anything in over a year, I'd be a bit testy too.