US guns fuel Canada and Mexico crimes, UK gun crime remains rare
Published: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 - 07:23 in Mathematics & Economics

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (29 July 2009) ? 
Guns smuggled from the US arm criminals in Canada and Mexico, contributing to a 
higher murder rate in Canada and more intense drug crime conflict near the 
Mexican border, according to a study published today in a special issue of 
Criminology and Criminal Justice, published by SAGE. However, authors Philip J. 
Cook, of Duke University Durham, NC, US, Wendy Cukier Ryerson of the University 
of Toronto, Canada and Keith Krause from the Graduate Institute of International 
and Development Studies Geneva, Switzerland highlight a dearth of empirical 
evidence on gun crime available to criminologists. Gun violence in North America 
remains the subject of considerable speculation and debate. In their paper The 
Illicit Firearms Trade in North America, the authors draw upon economics 
concepts, examining gun crime in the context of each country's regulatory 
framework.

The US is undoubtedly a major supplier of illegal guns (particularly handguns) 
to both Canada and Mexico. But limited data hamper efforts to predict the effect 
of a successful crackdown on illegal firearms by US authorities, the authors 
suggest. Both policy makers and law enforcement would benefit from research to 
fill these information gaps.

The data that are available show that the majority of traced handguns recovered 
from Canadian crime scenes originate in US. Another major source of illegal guns 
in Canada, and in many other countries is "leakage" from state stockpiles 
(police and military) through theft, corruption or other means. For instance, 
'insiders' illegally sold over 3000 firearms recovered in crime or surrendered 
in amnesties to the Metropolitan Toronto Police Service.

Investigators have traced 90 to 95 percent of weapons in Mexico to the US, but 
how did they get there? The guns sampled may not represent the bigger picture: 
the figure reflects firearms submitted for tracing by Mexican authorities. 
Authorities recover only a fraction of firearms from crimes and gun battles, and 
traces are only requested on some recovered weapons.

Central America, a region awash with weapons imported by both governments and 
rebel groups during the civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, is a 
further potential weapon source to Mexico, as are Chinese, Russian, Eastern 
European, or other sources. To date evidence is mainly anecdotal. Still less is 
known about the third source of weapons, the Mexican security forces themselves. 
The Small Arms Survey 2008 showed that weapons diverted from police and armed 
forces are a major and sometimes the main source of illicit weapons in many 
countries.

Some weapons used in Mexican crimes such as grenades, RPGs and fully automatic 
weapons are less easy to acquire in the US, and have probably arrived from 
elsewhere. This contrasts with Canada, where very few cases detail handguns from 
anywhere but the US, other than arms illegally diverted from legal Canadian 
supplies.

According to Cook, the specific impact and effects of illicitly trafficked 
firearms are unknowns. "Although we know that armed violence can have a variety 
of deleterious effects on perceived and real insecurity, public health, economic 
development, and political stability, we do not know how much of this can be 
associated specifically with changes in the availability of firearms," he says.

Some values can be quantified: Previous research has shown that life expectancy 
is lowered by 0.6 years for all Mexicans as a result of armed violence, with the 
US and Canada figures at 0.31 and 0.08, respectively. But firearms' negative 
effects are highly context dependent, with factors such as demand strength, 
types of weapons circulating, social groups with weapons access and reasons they 
possess them all contributing to the mix.

"The use of guns by criminal groups increases their relative power, and in the 
dramatic circumstances we see in Mexico, contributes to subverting legitimate 
authority and creating such fear as to have a substantial economic and political 
impact," says Cook.

The rate of gun homicide in Canada is statistically low and falling, yet public 
perception is that gun crime is rising. When Toronto, a city with 2.8 million 
people hit 52 gun homicides in 2005, it became "the year of the gun" in spite of 
the fact that the city had one of the lowest murder rates on the continent for a 
city of its size. Rates of homicide with guns are 6.7 times higher in the US 
than in Canada, and the US has 5.1 times Canada's rate per 100,000 of gun 
robberies.

The authors speculate US authorities would not only have to stem the supply of 
smuggled weapons from the US, but also other potential sources to successfully 
block the flow of deadly arms to criminals and criminal organizations.

Statements made by public officials are usually intended to influence public 
opinion by offering conclusions, rather than to inform researchers' analyses, 
the authors believe. They call for more data from criminal investigations and 
gun tracing to be made available to researchers.

"A broader inquiry is warranted," says Cook. "The stakes are very high for 
developing effective strategies for limiting the illicit movements of guns."

Another paper in the same issue on firearms discusses the UK and the 
Netherlands, which have among the lowest occurrence of gun-homicide in advanced 
industrial democracies. In Third Wave Criminology, guns, crime and social order, 
Adam Edwards of Cardiff University, UK and James Sheptycki, of York University, 
Canada use these examples to illustrate the evolution of criminology in the 
context of evolving paradigms from the sociology of science in the wake of 
postmodernism, and towards a basis for action in the face of scientific 
uncertainty.