06.16.2016 08:53 AM

From next week’s column, in which I refer to men with small penises and big guns

Quote:

“Here, unlike down there, we do not make it easy for Islamic extremists, or haters, or the mentally ill, to get guns. Here in Canada, unlike in the United States, we have not elevated gun ownership to a state religion.

The statistics grimly bear this out. One that was pinging around Twitter, in the wake of Orlando, was this: “Canada has had eight mass shooting in 20 years. America has had seven since last Monday.” I don’t know if that is scrupulously accurate, but it sounds about right.

Orlando’s causality, then, could have been Islamic terror, or hate crime, or mental illness. But its methodology was the shocking ubiquity – and the easy accessibility – of guns in the United States of America.

Right about now, of course, some gun nut loser is moving their lips, reading what I’ve written, and is readying to deploy the usual barrage of bullshit statistics favoured by that terrorist group, the NRA. Sitting in their jammies in their mother’s basement – with their small penises, and their big guns – the gun fetishists will argue it’s all about mens rea, not actus reus. They always do.

But they’re wrong, of course.”

38 Comments

  1. dean sherratt says:

    To be clear for the many non-lawyers, both mens rea (“guilty mind”) and actus reus (“guilty mind”) are needed to commit a criminal offense.

    As for the general issue, for context I have never owned, loaded or fired a gun in my life and am unlikely to ever do so as long as I have a board with a nail in it for dire emergencies.

    Both gun “controlists”/”abolitionists” and “gun nuts” display an extraordinary inability to understand the concepts of their opponents…a near fatal flaw. In Canada, managing the long gun registry was the best argument for liberalized gun ownership ever made and its adoption in the emotional trauma of the massacre at Ecole Polytechnique is a splendid example of why haste is rarely a political virtue in policy making and enacting.

    For the USA, I think it is an inherently more violent society than Canada and quite a number of people are killed by other means than by guns of various calibers. So making the USA like Canada is not in the cards.

    • dean sherratt says:

      I regret to confess that actus reus means quilty act not mind…a typo on my part.

    • bluegreenblogger says:

      I seriously doubt that violent behaviour is inherently greater in one set of homo sapiens sapiens over a different set. We are hard wired for both extreme, and non-lethal violence towards one another, and that is a demonstrable fact.

  2. davie says:

    …but, I don’t have a gun.

  3. Hooli says:

    Vicious, insulting and… not incorrect.
    I find our gun laws relatively reasonable. But..

    I am concerned at the rising level of enthusiasm for black guns, and not for hunting. Our border is porous to American culture. While there are reasonable barriers in place to acquiring these weapons (and they are weapons, as well as firearms) they still don’t prevent a person from taking a legally-acquired semi-automatic firearm, drilling the rivets out of a bunch of 30-round magazines, and going for broke.
    The law says they can only be fired at ranges. Bad guys don’t obey the law, by definition. How do we deal with murderous thoughts?

    Thanks for your commentary. Using a blind screen name today, because.. crazies.

  4. Clarke Wood says:

    Calling gun ownership a state religion is accurate. Gun owners in the US seem utterly unaffected by any rational argument, empirical evidence, or even the ever-rising body count when it comes to suggestions about controlling or limiting access to firearms. Their response to every mass shooting are suggestions that more people should have more guns.

  5. gyor says:

    I can’t argue with your logic, your position seems 100% rational.

    • Warren says:

      Thanks. Sorry about your penis.

      • davie says:

        The lad’s first foray into the brothel, and as he stands naked before his service agent, she smiles, “Oh dear, who do you think you will please with that?”
        He looks down, then at her, and smiles back, “Me! I hope.”

  6. Luke says:

    I can tell you are trying extremely hard to win over American gun-lovers.

  7. Peter says:

    Brazil has very tight gun control and well less than ten percent of the number of legal guns the States has. It’s also reputed to be a world leader in impressive penises. It’s gun homicide rate is more than three times the U.S. rate.

    Even more psychologically perplexing than the American fascination with guns is the Canadian preoccupation with the American fascination with guns.

    • Francis says:

      I don’t know where you got the stats on that penis anecdote, but there are enough stats that indicate Brazil’s poverty level being 10 times that of the US.

      You could have an all encompassing ban on firearms in Brazil but that wouldn’t do a thing to reduce the degree of poverty in that country that incubates violence.

      Your analogy is akin to comparing the lung capacity of an Olympic diver with years of training and financing to a 5th grade gym student.

      A country as rich, prosperous and stable as the United States shouldn’t be content with third world living standards.

      • Peter says:

        I haven’t a clue what you are trying to say. As much as I neither admire, envy nor even understand the American attitude to guns, I am amazed how artful the Canadian nationalist left can be at reducing even an ISIS-related terrorist atrocity to a boilerplate anti-American rant that shifts the blame to the underlying rottenness of the Rapacious Yankee Trader. Wanna hear my theory about how responsibility for the beheading of Hall goes back through Harper all the way to the Crusades?

        I’m finding it harder and harder to take the gun control forces seriously. They seem to have become thoroughly bored with the hard work needed to address incredibly thorny issues of culture, constitutional law, crime, confiscation and prefer to just hold candlelight vigils in emotional circumstances and listen to hope-and-dream speeches about how the States would become just like Denmark if only they would pass an all-purpose law, which they can’t apparently do because of all those small-penis JimBobbies in bars chugging cold ones and insisting it’s about that there mens rea.

        • Francis says:

          Evidently, you didn’t.

          Allow me to condense my comments above:

          – You compared Brazil’s state of gun violence to the one in the US despite the presence of what you describe as much more restrictive gun laws in Brazil.
          – I retorted that Brazil’s level of extreme poverty should be accounted for when making any measurement seeing as how it is a major factor in the state of gun violence in that country.
          – I also proposed that making a comparison between a 3rd world country and a 1st world country, such as the USA, would be injudicious given that the both have vastly different socio-economic circumstances.

          The essence of my point was that your dismissiveness towards gun control isn’t rooted in any sound factual basis because the evidence that currently exists firmly indicates the diametrically opposite of what you are arguing. The rest is conjecture and opinion.

          • Peter says:

            Brazil’s level of extreme poverty should be accounted for..

            I suspect you would be in favour of accounting for anything that points to the conclusion you like, but if you actually study the stats on this subject, your simplistic conclusions won’t hold. Brazil has a GNI per capita between one third and one quarter of the States, less than five percent of the number of legal guns and a gun homicide rate six times higher. India has three times the number of legal guns that Brazil does, one third of its GNI per capita and one sixtieth of its gun homicide rate. Finland’s gun homicide rate is twice India’s. So what were you saying about poverty?

            Another thing. All the scary talk about assault rifles is Hollywood stuff. The number of homicides from rifles and shotguns of all kinds in the States is roughly the same as from fists, feet, etc. The overwhelming majority of gun deaths are the result of handguns in the course of criminal activity, particularly in urban cores. So, if all those people at candlelight vigils calling for banning assault weapons got their way, it wouldn’t make a big dent in the homicide rate.

        • Maps Onburt says:

          You took the words right out of my mouth (and said it far better than I would have). I’m not a gun nut. Don’t own a gun, have zero need for one, but have shot plenty over my life. The arguments on both sides of this issue, just like on abortion, assisted dying, or just about any other contentious subject are in large part to blame. I can’t for the life of me understand why any society would allow people to own or freely drive around with machine guns or RPGs. On the flip side, making all guns illegal or even registered is every bit as ridiculous as there is no way to haul back the guns that are already out there. Make an AK-47 illegal and you will find that in order to take them out of circulation you’ll have to collect about 100M of them – clearly not practicable. There are already all sorts of laws preventing guns used to commit a crime. This doesn’t seem to deter criminals in the least. This guy went through the security checks, tried (and failed) to buy a bulletproof vest, transfer his assets to his brother for $10 and posted all sorts of rants of Facebook and told anyone remotely listening he was going to dget naomething like this. He went through all of those checks and balances like a hot knife through butter. How exactly is making gun ownership illegal going to stop determined whack jobs like him when there are already more guns than people in the US. How exactly does the progressive left propose to get them out of circulation??? It’s easy for people to sit back and say fucking stupid things like small penises but that country was formed on the basis of taking, by force, the power from remote elites and giving it to the people. It’ll be a cold day in hell before very last non criminal in the US volunteers to turn in their guns and then what do you do with the guns the criminals have? Sitting back in mommy’s basement dreaming about utopia is t going to solve this issue and having both sides using every mass shooting as an excuse to politic before the corpses are even cold is beyond disgusting. Chicago has the strictest gun control laws in the US but the highest gun crime rate. Clearly making them illegal hasn’t stopped criminals from using guns. All it would have taken in that bar is one gun toting Texan to put a hole in that terrorist from inside. Why can both sides see there are reasonable arguments and start working towards a REALISTIC solution – perhaps it has more to do with small brains than small penises.

    • davie says:

      We aren’t preoccupied; we are doing our duty as conscience of the continent.

  8. patrick says:

    A fish stinks from the head down.

    The US is a military state that has been on a war economy since the second world war.
    It is violent at the top, with military coups, arm sales, and acts of aggression that destablize areas, that allows for
    the taxpayer funded replenishment of tanks, planes, guns, etc to the benefit of war profiteers.
    This mission is impossible to maintain if you don’t have a core mass that believes armaments is a viable
    solution to everyday trouble. The right to bare arms is a cry for the right to be violent.
    Mass shootings are collateral damage

    • bluegreenblogger says:

      hm, yes, we need more bare arms, so such a right is well entrenched. Bare thighs are a little more risque. Bare breasts though, definitely need to forbid them!

  9. Charles says:

    Link to ridicule gun ownership fetish.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0

  10. Shawn says:

    I HAVE A SMALL PENIS

  11. Francis says:

    Just some context to those numbers: the last time Canada had a mass shooting in the double digits was back in 1989 with the Polytechnique massacre which resulted in 15 deaths. Sandy Hook, in 2012, resulted in 28 deaths — of which, 20 were children. 1873 was the last time in Canada a mass shooting resulted in 20+ deaths, though the circumstances back then are vastly different from that of today’s.

    Gun control has turned into a proxy issue for right-wing nativists battling their diminishing dominance in American society. The problem with gun-rights advocates (also known as massacre proponents) is that their logic in argument is increasingly thinning. Republican inflexibility on the issue forces them to confront an inherent flaw in their own rationale: when individuals are assessed as being unsafe for flight, then why should they be allowed to possess a firearm? Republicans argue that personal freedoms should be disregarded with increased surveillance on, yet refuse to compromise on the accessibility of firearms on the premise of “second amendment, constitutional rights”.

    All in all, the debate has reached peak petulance as NRA affiliated individuals refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of adaptation to new realities because of preconceived notions of superiority.

    Sarah Palin summed up this matter well when she spoke of “right wingin’, bitter clingin’; our guns, our god and our religion”. Guns are not a rights issue, but an identity matter.

    • davie says:

      ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’

      I have never been able to read this amendment and find that it means each individual has a right to own a fire arm.

      Let me try this construction with another topic. A school authority has a high school with 1200 students.

      The school authority has a policy that reads: “A well trained basketball team, being necessary to the self esteem of a modern high school, the right of the students to a basketball court, shall not be infringed.’

      So, how many basketball courts does the school authority have to build?

      • Francis says:

        Thats a yarn of logic that I wouldn’t even bother to unravel.

        The fact of the matter is that the rationale behind gun-rights is diametrically opposite to the existing realities of modern day America. The 2nd Amendment is an albatross of demagoguery around the neck of Americans who want neither guns in their children’s schools nor want to take them away from farmers. Gun culture is undeniably at a point of no return in the US, but the growing entrenchment of gun rights and right wing politics is literally killing Americans.

        The appropriate response to a massacre can’t possibly be “more guns” because it undermines the legitimacy of the police force whose fundamental purpose is to protect Americans. The gun-advocate interpretation of the 2nd Amendment makes the US sound more like tribal-Afghanistan than a stable, functioning Western nation.

  12. Darren H says:

    The issue is not banning the assault rifles and guns. The issue is how are you going to sieze all of them without starting a war within your own country. The latter prevents the former sadly.

  13. Niall says:

    Hi WK,

    In between your bootless attempts to alter (revoke) the US’s 2nd Amendment, perhaps you could divert some attention to your holy Lieberal brethren: those elect prefects who have decided that the past shall no longer be the past.

    LPC Memory Hole* (Patent Pending)

    You people suck (hard) out in left field.

    Yours in Christ,

    Niall from Winnipeg

    BTW, aren’t you like a LLB, or “liberal” (or something that sounds like that anyway). ??

    Schmucko.

    * in the bewildering case that the cbc hasn’t wallpaper covered this already (inside voice: ha ha ba ha) ha ha

    http://ipolitics.ca/2016/06/16/un-googled-trudeau-government-had-harper-web-pages-removed-from-search-results/

  14. Manuel says:

    For the most part gun control is a ship of fools, sailing past root causes trying to catch the white wale.

  15. Tired of it All says:

    You forgot the inevitable ‘crime guns’ red herring…

  16. Al in Cranbrook says:

    Interesting report from the FBI re: homicides and methods, 2009 to 2013…

    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2009-2013.xls

    Note the distinctions, particularly between, say, “rifles” (including AR15s), “knives” and “personal weapons”.

    My guess is that the FBI is probably a pretty reliable source of information on this subject.

    Separating fact from myth, media generated perception (an AR!5 is NOT an “automatic assault” weapon), and all that stuff.

    However…

    We now have the reality of a relatively new phenomena: religious/ideological inspired terrorist attacks across western democracies, most of which have far stricter regulation of firearms ownership than either America or, for that matter, Canada. Where we are learning, yet again, that all the laws in the world will not prevent such people (or criminals) hell bent on violence (or criminal activities) from acquiring whatever weapons of choice they so desire.

    Clearly, we are now learning, Orlando falls within this category.

    Just as clearly, politicians deferring to the matter of gun control is more about a distraction from this reality, if for no other reason than it’s an easier…meaning less controversial…debate to have than is the matter of dealing with religious fundamentalist inspired mass murder.

    • Al in Cranbrook says:

      From the NY TIMES…

      http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/10/us/gun-sales-terrorism-obama-restrictions.html?_r=0

      Two distinct parameters cause firearms sales to spike dramatically in the US: a) the threat of new restrictions on ownership, and b) an event involving mass murder.

      I recently saw a statistic (that I can’t find right now) that noted that during the Bush administration firearms sales increased by about 38%, while sales during the Obama regime increased over 140%.

      Which begs the question: Why?

      I would suggest, simply because fewer and fewer people trust the State to look after their personal or civil security.

      No matter how one tries to skirt this reality, the fact remains that at the end of the day the protection of freedom and liberty ultimately rests with the people.

      This point is especially driven home when the State’s security forces almost always show up just in time to take a body count. And, frankly, the reality is that, short of imposing marshal law, there is little realistic rationale to expect much more of security forces.

      Which is to say that the perception of security is an extremely fragile bubble that, in the final analysis, only exists within the limited context of mutual agreement.

  17. Wolfer says:

    I think it’s easy to get guns in Canada.

    Despite what the media first reported about the two that committed Columbine being Nazis who went around the school chanting, “Kill the N*ggrs, kill the Sp*cs,” Columbine was a school that’s about 110% white. All of the analysis at the time was wrong. And Omar Mateen had been a regular in the gay bar he massacred.

    Have you been to America? There’s no way out! If your 17 your only way out is to join the army.

    In Canada in the ’90s scores of people from Ontario would get on a bus and head to BC. Today it’s far easier to leave the town your in and show up somewhere else. Canada is a kinder, gentler country. After bankrupting themselves fighting the Cold War America doesn’t have the social safety net.

    I’d rather be homeless in Kitchener, Ontario or Victoria, BC than a city of comparable size in the States.

    After growing up watching Seinfeld it’s hard for people to move to NY and live that kind of lifestyle.

    I blame the Jews. The Hollywood Jews that is.

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