00:16:31.560A lot of the criminals have come here from low-trust societies who can't believe their good luck with our open immigration system.
00:16:38.280But whatever the cause is, let's look at the effect.
00:16:41.720And I was on Twitter yesterday, or X is now called, and I came across a post by my friend, Dr. John Lott, who's the head of crimeresearch.org.
00:16:51.220And he's also a published author of books like More Guns, Less Crime.
00:16:55.800Let me read to you his tweets and then we'll pull in Dr. Lott for a conversation.
00:17:00.820He says, Canada's crime problem, worse than people realize, Canada's overall violent crime victimization rate was 295% higher than the U.S. rate.
00:17:15.960Even if sexual assaults are excluded to reduce differences in definitions, Canada's violent crime rate remained 175% higher.
00:17:27.420I have to say that that's quite shocking.
00:17:29.860There's one more tweet in the thread by Dr. Lott.
00:17:33.520Robbery provides an especially useful comparison because the surveys measure it in a similar way.
00:17:39.380The Canadian robbery rate was 268% higher than the American rate.
00:17:44.580Canadians are roughly 366 times more likely to be robbed than to become homicide victims,
00:17:53.280underscoring how misleading it is to focus public discussion almost exclusively on murder rates.
00:17:57.880property crime shows a similar pattern
00:18:27.200as more peaceful and placid people than those rambunctious Americans.
00:18:32.980Where are those numbers from, Dr. Locke?
00:18:36.680Well, they're from the Canadian Statistics Canada.
00:18:42.080People have to understand there are two different measures that we have of crime.
00:18:46.280There's crimes to report to police, and that's what most people focus on.
00:18:51.040That's what the media covers all the time.
00:18:53.380But the Canadian government and the U.S. government knows that the vast majority of crimes aren't reported to police.
00:19:00.980So, you know, in the United States in a recent year, about 48 percent of violent crime was reported to police.
00:19:09.060In Canada, the most recent numbers that you have for that indicate that it was about 21 percent.
00:19:14.340Well, even if the true underlying rate of crime was exactly the same in the two countries, if you're looking at reported crime and only half as many violent crimes are being reported to police or less in Canada than the United States, then the reported crime is going to make it look like the United States has a much higher rate, even though that's not the case.
00:19:38.860And when you break it down and compare apples to apples and look at total crimes, the numbers that Statistics Canada puts out indicates that the Canadian violent crime rate is probably around 300 percent higher, about 300 percent higher than it is in the United States.
00:19:59.840I saw just in passing that there were eight murders, eight homicides in Chicago alone over the weekend.
00:20:06.160And that's the kind of story that Canadians see.
00:20:10.060And then we think to ourselves, we're much less violent.
00:20:12.580I think a lot of the murders in the U.S. are gang-on-gang violence.
00:20:18.100That doesn't make it any less violent or doesn't make it any better.
00:20:22.320But it suggests it's not a random occurrence, whereas a burglary or a home invasion is, I would imagine, more crime of profit rather than some sort of grudge or vendetta.
00:20:36.320What people don't realize is how incredibly concentrated in tiny areas are murders in the United States.
00:20:43.580The United States is very unique in terms of that.
00:20:47.82056% of the murders in the United States occur in 2% of the counties.
00:20:53.260About 73% of the murders occur in 5% of the counties.
00:20:59.100And if you look at those 2% of the counties that have 56% of the murders, about two-thirds of their murders occur within 10 block areas within those counties.
00:21:10.640And it's overwhelmingly gang-related type crimes that are there.
00:21:16.520To look at it differently, you have about 52% of the counties in the United States have zero murders in any given year.
00:21:30.040So about 70% of the counties in the United States have either zero or one murder.
00:21:37.280Together, they account for about 3% of the murders that take place in the United States.
00:21:42.880So, you know, if you look at the most recent murder data for last year, it looks like the murder rate in the United States is slightly below 4 per 100,000.
00:21:55.540The most recent data that you have for Canada is about 1.9.
00:21:59.880So the murder rate in the United States is indeed about twice as high as the murder rate in Canada.
00:22:07.500But not only is it different in terms of being incredibly concentrated in tiny areas, but you have other things that are very unique about what's going on in the United States in terms of it being overwhelmingly gang related, for example.
00:22:24.140Now, gang related also is a proxy for different demographic groups, ethnic groups. In Canada, we have high crime pockets that are sort of out of sight, out of mind. They're not typically in our urban core. I'm talking about Indian reserves. And there's an enormous amount of violence on Indian reserves.
00:22:40.980There was even something called the murdered and missing indigenous women issue, where a lot of indigenous women were murdered or missing.
00:22:52.400And the RCMP spent an enormous amount of resources answering the question, where are they gone?
00:22:59.140And I know this is shocking to say, the majority of them were murdered by people they knew, family members, spouses, boyfriends, etc.
00:23:09.120And I think that Canadians sometimes look down our noses at the U.S. with some sort of condescension about how they have demographic challenges with minorities.
00:23:19.880I think we have them here in Canada. They're just on Indian reserves, so we don't often see a lot of them.
00:23:25.580But let's talk about burglaries and home invasions, because at least in the city I am, that's a major issue.
00:23:31.860um what do you think is i don't know if you would be able to answer what's driving that but uh
00:23:41.780why is it so much more than the u.s is that because i i can't imagine that's related to
00:23:48.280gangs in the same way maybe i'm wrong give any info on that well we have some information on that
00:23:55.400canada doesn't have quite as much data on these types of things as we have in the united states
00:24:00.320but you do have some data. And the basic notion with crime generally is if you want to reduce
00:24:06.920crime, you have to make it riskier for criminals to commit crime. That means higher arrest rates,
00:24:11.620higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences. But it also means being able to let victims be
00:24:17.000able to go and defend themselves. So, you know, if you look at burglars, not only is the burglary
00:24:22.760rate in Canada about 259% higher than the burglary rate in the United States, but data I've seen
00:24:29.380from the past indicates that your hot burglary rate, these are burglaries that occur while the
00:24:34.280residents are at home, is much higher. It's something around 40 percent compared to about
00:24:40.10013 percent in the United States. And, you know, you look at when burglaries occur in the United
00:24:46.240States, burglaries overwhelmingly occur about two o'clock in the afternoon because burglars want to
00:24:53.260go and break in when they know people aren't home. In Canada, you have a lot more burglaries that
00:24:58.900occur in the evening because then they can go and force people to go and tell them where their
00:25:04.820valuables are that's there. And so you can make it risky by the fact that criminals are worried
00:25:13.260about getting shot. In the United States, I don't have this data for Canada, but if you compare it
00:25:20.080to the UK, for example, which has a similar pattern, the UK burglars spend about half as long
00:25:27.600casing at home compared to burglars in the United States. And they almost always break in in the
00:25:33.220evening when people are home. And so not only do American burglars break in when people are less
00:25:41.740likely to be home, but even on top of that, they still spend about twice as long making sure people
00:25:47.600aren't home because that's the way to make sure that they're not at risk of getting shot.
00:25:51.540That's incredible. Canada keeps bringing in new media-centric gun laws. I mean, they make no sense. They announced banning 2,000 different models of firearms, and they can't even explain what these are. They ban what they call assault rifles. They don't really know what that means. They can't define it.
00:26:13.400But they do this perpetually, like it's a constant, constant drumbeat of some announcement.
00:26:19.100And I think the more crime goes up, the more actual home invasions and burglaries and violent crimes go up, the more they have these placebos with greater ferocity and frequency, as if to distract.
00:26:34.760I think they're probably doing it because it works.
00:26:39.300How is it possible to take a society with gun control like Canada?
00:26:44.400And I don't know, what would it take to convince a country like Canada to allow homeowners to arm themselves?