Careful, Musket. ;-) They who bang rocks may turn to throwing rocks presently. There are relatively few gun deaths per capita in Canada (if you leave out suicide)...fewer than in the USA...but I think it's more because of a difference in culture....cultural ideas and expectations... than because of a difference in laws. The whole domestic history of Canada has been sedate and orderly, whereas the history of the USA has revolved around periods of lawlessness (such as in the territories, prior to statehood, for example). It's a different psychology, you see, and it has produced a population with different attitudes. In the development of Canada, the RCMP (Mounties) and the rule of law always went into frontier territories first and established a very consistent rule of law. The immigrants then followed. There was no chance for gunslingers, whiskey traders, and bandit gangs to establish themselves in the new territories. In the USA, however, the territories before statehood were basically in a state of anarchy, and every sort of organized vice and violence moved into the vacuum and flourished. This tended to produce a culture with much violence, and the law came a good deal later and then tried to cope with the violence. Look at the history of Prohibition in the USA, and the explosion of organized crime and violence that that produced! During the same period Canada had legal alcohol...and did not suffer the wave of crime that swept across the USA. The USA seems to have had a tendency on the one had toward extreme laissez-faire lack of legal order...and then extremely puritan over-reaction in the other direction, as evidence in the completely stupid idea of Prohibition, an idea which couldn't possibly succeed in a culture where most people WANT to drink alcohol.
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