Interesting article from Canada...

...regarding Canadian gun laws:

What is remarkable, however, is that the Liberals' 1995 controls -- requiring all owners and guns to be licensed -- seem to have had no discernable impact. Following implementation of those regulations, firearms deaths simply continued at the rate of decline begun in 1991.

There are other indications of the most recent controls' uselessness. 'In each year,' Ms. Wilkins writes, 'about four-fifths of all firearms-related deaths were suicides.' And while in the past decade and a half firearms suicides have been cut in half, the overall rate of suicides has dropped just 15%, all of which is likely explicable by the ageing Canadian population. (Nearly every Western country has experienced a similar decline in suicides in cases where the average age of its citizens has risen.) While firearms suicides went from 4.5 per 100,000 population in 1979 to 2.0 in 2002, 'suicide by suffocation/hanging ... rose from 3 to 5 deaths per 100,000.' While gun controls may have helped reduce the number of firearms suicides, they did not lower the overall rate of suicides, meaning, at best, controls merely encouraged troubled Canadians to find other methods for taking their own lives.

tnx to John Lott