Guns and Butter

When I was introduced to supply side economics in high school we were all taught that capitalism is about supply and demand, the old guns and butter hypothesis. Its all about what we call today rational choice economics, you can choose to spend money on the military or on essentials such as public service. Guns or butter. The more guns the less butter. And guns were always more expensive to produce than butter.

Today we could use the same analogy for the Paul Martins announcement that he will ban hand guns in Canada. His audience was a group of school kids in Toronto. What he told them was the old guns and butter example as applied to politics. You can get more headway publicity wise by banning guns than by promising social programs (butter) to deal with the issue of violence in visible minority communities. His presence in a visible minority community school shows he was trying to butter up folks for his gun announcement.

Hand guns are severly restricted in Canada, and have been since Trudeau introduced gun control. To get a handgun in Canada you must be registered with a FAC, and now registered with the billion dollar Firearms Registry boondoogle. You must get a permit from your local police department, to move your gun from your home, if you are going to the shooting range. And that permit is for that day only and for transportation from point A to point B and back to point A. Failure to get the permit and you can loose your gun and your FAC and your access.

So who is carrying guns? Well not legal hand gun owners. It's the new bling bling of Night Club culture as the recent shooting in Vancouver shows. Graffiti artists's slaying may spur gun amnesty Guns have replaced fast cars and cell phones as the club culture status symbol.

Ms. Slade said a decade ago she thought nothing of going out to nightclubs in the city. Now, however, she wouldn't because of a series of shooting incidents in recent years. "I'm afraid to go the bars. . . . It's getting worse and worse. You never know who's going to have a gun."

In Torontoa recent spat of shootings is driving the Martin announcement, and at the point of stating the obvious gun violence in the largest city in Canada has always driven the governments gun control legislation. While gun violence is also a problem in other large Canadian cities, such as Vancouver and even in Edmonton the shooting violence in Toronto is identified with the poverty of the Afro Canadian community in that city. In the other cities its identified with middle class ethnic crime, usually around drugs. Where the issue is poverty then we need social programs for employment to overcome this. If it is drugs then we need decriminalization.

Now drugs are illegal, and illegal guns are well illegal, but that doesn't stop anyone . Nor will Martins hand gun legislation. It will only further restrict those who abide by Canadas restrictive gun laws, moreso than even England, and reduce their access to hand guns for sport shooting.

Legalizing drugs would be a start to reduce crime both in the suburbs and the inner city. But the deciminalization of marijuana laws died on the table, again, when the election was called. Decriminalizing all drugs, would go along way to breaking the cycle of crime that prohibition has always encouraged. Its butter thats , better social programs and decriminalization, the economic solution to theproblem of gun violence in Canada. Some may say this is simplistic but it is no more so than Paul Martins announcement this morning.

For more debate on this go to progressive bloggers.