

      Perhaps I failed to make myself clear:  Minorities in the U.S.
*correlate* with poverty.  This isn't good and we should address it,
but we shouldnt' ignore that minorities and poverty *do* tend to go
together.

      *Does* Vancouver have a consistantly poor population drawn along
racial lines?  If it doesn't, then assumptions of being able to compare
minority vs. majority in both cities is questionable at best.


       If the *rate* of increase over a period of several years remains
unchanged, or increases, I think it's not a far jump to say that the laws
are not effective.  No, you can't sit down and say that things wouldn't
have been worse.  I don't have a crystal ball and neither do you.  However,
that road leads us to a place where it is impossible to critique *any*
action.  If it gets down to be, "It might have been worse without them,"
then there *is* no valid objection, which I'm sure would amuse certain
people to no end.


       So we've got a situation where we have several options:

	1)  The crime rate decreased:  Obviously gun control worked.

	2)  The crime rate remained the same:  It would have been worse
	without gun control.

	3)  The crime rate increased:  Perhaps the laws prevented an
	even bigger increase.

       Cute testing ground we've got.  All responses support the proposition
that gun control works.

       The question is this:  Did Washington D.C. experiance an increase
in its violent and/or gun crime rate which was greater than the pattern
indicated prior to the implemented gun control laws.  If it did, then
the suggestion that the problem the gun control laws were designed to
"control" did not exist in their entirety prior to the gun control laws.
