The American Thinker magazine has just published a study by researcher Sierra Rayne comparing the effect of gun laws on crime rates in 102 countries. The results don’t surprise me a bit.

According to Rayne, “there is no significant correlation between the rate of gun ownership and the homicide rate by guns among these countries.”

There is also no correlation, either, between gun ownership and the rate of other violent gun crimes such as armed robbery and assault with a weapon.

That means limiting civilian gun ownership does not reduce crime. There are countries such as Norway and Switzerland that have high rates of gun ownership (similar to those in the United States), yet have very low rates of gun crime.

Meanwhile, there are countries that have very low official rates of gun ownership and lots of gun controls — Russia, for one — that have gun-crime rates at or above America’s.

Rayne found no beneficial effect on crime regardless of what legal controls national governments imposed on gun owners. Licensing doesn’t make our streets safer, for instance, nor does the registration of guns whether rifles, shotguns or handguns.

Rayne doesn’t state this, but the reason is obvious: Criminals ignore gun controls.

I have always thought it absurd that anti-gun activists could believe that regulating legal gun ownership could cut down on violent crime. By definition, criminals have no regard for the law. That’s why they cheat, rob, steal, break-in, beat and kill in the first place.

Yet somehow it makes sense to otherwise highly educated gun-control supporters that criminals will obey mandatory licensing and registration requirements. Criminals who never hesitate to break laws against murder, theft, rape and more will suddenly stop what they are doing and stand in line to register their guns.

Rayne’s research shows once again that law-abiding citizens with guns are no threat to the community.

George Orwell once wrote that the “rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy.” It is a sign of who is in charge in a country — the people, not the politicians or police.

I refuse to trust any government that doesn’t trust my law-abiding neighbours — the manager of the local hardware store, the farmer or rancher down the road, the target shooting enthusiast, the guy whose hobby is collecting antique firearms — to own guns.

We are in trouble when our governments start to look upon ordinary citizens with suspicion just because they own guns. But that is exactly what has happened in Canada. It’s that attitude that was behind the RCMP’s recent gun grab in High River.

Another effect of this mentality is government misdirection of tax dollars. A gun registry that cost $2 billion or $3 billion makes sense only after you’ve convinced yourself that regular people with guns are as dangerous as criminals with guns.

Only then can you justify spending so much money setting up a central database and bureaucracy rather than spending it rounding up drug dealers and gangbangers.

To further illustrate how futile it is for police to spend their time running around harassing law-abiding gun owners, consider what Gary Mauser, an emeritus professor at the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. found 2011: Gun owners are less than half as likely to commit murder as the population as a whole.

Indeed, the rates of all sorts of crime — violent and otherwise — are much lower among gun owners than among the general population.

No matter how much governments harass, probe, interrogate and watch over legal gun owners, their efforts will never have a meaningful impact crime stats.