07.24.2012 12:00 AM

In today’s Sun: death by gun

Whenever a lot of people get murdered by people carrying guns – as they have, recently, in Toronto and Denver – other people ask: “How did this happen? Why do these things keep happening?”

With the greatest of respect, those are unintelligent questions. One does not need to be a police officer, or a scientist, to know that (a) crazy and/or stupid people exist and (b) if you make it easier for crazy and/or stupid people to get guns, they will use them on innocent people.

There are other factors at work, of course. But those are the big ones. If you don’t get that, you need more help that a newspaper opinion column can provide.

Now, when I was a cop reporter, in Calgary and Ottawa, I noticed that the higher-ups would lay on more officers whenever it was hot, or a full moon, or when school was out. That’s because violent crime tended to go up, noticeably, on those occasions. The reasons, to me, were straightforward: when it got hot, people drank more. When people drank more, they did stupid things, sometimes involving guns.

40 Comments

  1. Dan says:

    “Our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws.”

    So how long do we have to wait before our Conservative government gets rid of data on all these factors?

    It will be easier for Canada to imitate American gun policy if we can eradicate any evidence that gun laws actually work.

    YES WE CAN!

    • Fred says:

      “So how long do we have to wait before our Conservative government gets rid of data on all these factors? ”

      No waiting required! The Reformers have already destroyed the valuable long form census data set by making it voluntary. Their continued slashing of budgets and jobs at Statistics Canada ensures that more valuable data concerning Canadian society (including the effects of gun laws on our society) will be irreparably damaged if not outright destroyed.

      The Philistines are not just at the gate, but they have broken into the city that is Canadian society and are destroying everything in sight.

  2. !o! says:

    Nice article.

    One does not indeed need to be a police officer or a scientist to know that crazy and/or stupid people exist. Some of them lead cities with ideas like deporting gun criminals (including Canadian citizens?) while cutting social spending.

    http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/cityhallpolitics/article/1228864–mayor-rob-ford-wants-ottawa-to-use-immigration-laws-against-convicted-gang-members

  3. Tim Sullivan says:

    I would expect that a mayor of any size of city, lawyer or not, to have a rudimentary understanding of the make-up and organization of the federal government or a basic understanding of the Charter of Rights.

    It is my guess that the immigrants and refugees who become citizens of Canada a) have a cleaner criminal record than the mayor of Toronto and b) a better understanding of civics and the Charter.

  4. Mike B says:

    Be careful Warren, those same gun nuts are about to descend on this blog and your article to try and prove you wrong. Got to give them credit for their persistence, but maybe its because they know they are fighting a losing battle.

  5. Philip says:

    Warren:
    While not wanting to stir up another 300+ comments, I think your Point B is very important. No private citizen needs to own either a hand gun or a restricted firearm. Police, correctional officers, military personnel, customs agents and some classes of security guards need to carry handguns and restricted weapons as tools of the job. Private citizens may want to own those weapons very badly but they don’t need to. There is even less need to have those handguns and restricted weapons stored in a private residence. I see no reason why those two classes of weapons should not be stored and used exclusively at gun clubs and ranges, in other words on commercial property with adequate 24/7 security and proper chain of custody procedures.

    This would go some way to address the safety neighborhoods and allow those who are in the handgun/restricted firearm hobby a safe, responsible venue to indulge in their pastime. Federal and provincial governments need to develope a tough, comprehensive border enforcement plan to stem the flow of illegal handguns and restricted weapons. An idea I have heard recently is to start to look to recover policing and first responder costs from gun violence directly from the manufacturers. Not an easy road to go down but an idea with some merit.

  6. Philippe says:

    What’s really sad Warren is that in the US, they can’t even have this debate. The Dems have become too chicken shit to open the issue because of political reasons. I can’t agree more that we need more gun control up here – but another part of the problem out of our control – as long as the US is flooded with guns that are specifically made to kill humans, those guns will make their way here (Also Mexico, as we’re witnessing).

    Here is a great explanation of why Dems won’t push for more gun control (having suffered from Clinton’s epic fail).
    http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/23/politics/obama-romney-guns/index.html

    And here, well-known conservative David Frum offers a good explanation as to *why* Americans love their guns. Irresponsible media play a massive role is stoking fears.
    http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/23/opinion/frum-guns/index.html

    Personally, I think the Democrats need to man-up. I’m sick of us Liberals cow-towing to what we perceive the public opinion to be, rather than lead on issues. Leaders are elected to lead, not follow. More gun control, please.

  7. dave says:

    Here is a small bit of info I came across recently:
    I realize that in USA their courts have interpreted their 2nd Amendment to mean that each individual has a right to own firearms. And I believe they have built a gun culture on those interpretations. But I have never been able to read that 2nd Amendment to mean individual rights; it still says to me that the arms are for a state militia.
    I was reading a review of a book about Latin grammar and rhetoric (never mind…some people spend their time playing golf…) and came across this little point. The reviewer said that in some Latin sentence construction, a 1st clause has the emphasis, and the 2nd clause extends the meaning in the 1st clause. The reviewer then offered that many, if not all, the composers of that 2nd Amendment were trained in Latin sentence rhetoric and grammar, and that they more likely meant the sentence to mean that the arms were for a state militia.

    But, as I mentioned, in USA they have built a gun culture based on their courts’ interpretations of that amendment’s wording. It would be difficult to unravel all that based on an obscure point about Latin sentence syntax.

    On your column, the hot weather plus alcohol bring some ugliness out of us. Maybe it would be easier to switch people to using pot, rather than alcohol, than it would to change the American (and, Canadian) gun culture.
    The points about inequality, poverty and ignorance are worth looking into, and addressing, that is for sure.

  8. Darren says:

    I’m not sure gun control would have had much of an impact in Colorado. A person in body armor throwing cluster bombs into a crowd would have killed a lot more than 12. A lot of psychological indicators are being viewed with hindsight glasses. How many people have personality quirks that “could” be viewed as an indicator of serious mental issues? I’m sure if Warren went on a killing spree, the fact that he is a middle aged man in a punk rock band would be viewed as “evidence” of him having deep-seated anger issues.

    We are a society that values rights above all else. The shooter in the US had the legal right to purchase everything he owned, both in terms of guns and explosives. In a society that values rights above all, the only way to really address these kinds of situations is to reduce rights. Call it what you want, gun control, sales bans it’s all reducing a person’s rights. For the Colorado case, what rights would have had to be removed to have prevented this incident entirely? What level of risk of these kinds of instances should we as a society consider as an unfortunate byproduct of a society that values rights above all else?

  9. GPAlta says:

    If we liberals truly believe reducing gun crime is as important as we say it is, then the time is now to start preparing for this to be a major election issue. The case is there to be made, but the Liberal party has to do the hard work of assembling the available data into an airtight package that no conservative can sensibly refute.

    The next election can not be fought in the middle of the road, because the Conservatives are already on a completely different (and made-up) road that we have to reject and bring the public back to reality.

    It is a very compelling argument to say that virtually 100% of climatologists believe in climate change, and it is possible that a similar argument may exist about gun control- the Liberal party has to find out what percentage of criminologists and sociologists support gun control, they need to find out what the experts say about it in general, not just what one expert says. They need to make themselves the party of truth and information because that will put them squarely in opposition to the Conservatives who are the party of fantasy and dis-information.

    Conservatives are wrong on guns, wrong on climate change, wrong on science, wrong on privacy, wrong on campaign finance, wrong on patronage, wrong on taxation, wrong on macroeconomics (wrong on Europe), wrong on refugees, wrong on the military, wrong on law and order, wrong on women, wrong on aboriginals, wrong on the Charter, etc. and in every case, it is the experts in the field (and often the Supreme Court of Canada) who say they are wrong–therefore they are wrong on truth, and wrong in the eyes of history.

    This should be a very easy election, but the Liberals have to be working every day from now until then on gathering evidence, not just ideas, and on assembling that evidence into strong, but easy to understand arguments.

    • !o! says:

      Interesting.

      Given the fact that the CPC inner circle is being very aggressively courted by the private prison industry and the like (i.e. the law and order provisions in the omnibus bill and the raft of associated policies), and given that crime is nevertheless at an all time low, and crime was not actually an election issue that people cared about before, the Cons need to do some issue generation via the tame media, making crime an issue when it isn’t in order to nullify broad critique of their policy. But they need to paddle against the stream of reality. Having predesigned responses to this is just simply good planning.

      It also ties in so very nicely to the enemy of science and public good narrative that is so very true and resonant.

      Nice post!

      • GPAlta says:

        thanks very much !o!,

        And of course, I think that if you follow the money in all of the issues you and I have mentioned, you will eventually find a conservative supporter profiting from their policies, like the prison industry that you have mentioned, or the firearms industry in the case of guns. Imagine how many fewer guns would be made and sold if none at all was destined for the black market, and imagine how that would impact the manufacturers’ and retailers’ bottom lines.

        I’m not responding to JamesHalifax below, because I don’t believe in engaging with him, but his post is a perfect illustration of where we will be in the next election if we don’t investigate very thoroughly the state of expert thought on all the issues we want to discuss. I say that the experts agree with me, he says that the experts agree with him, and it is an impasse, but it is only an impasse until we can drop a red book on the table with surveys of experts, names of experts, and statements from experts saying who is right. We can come up with that because we are right (if it so happened that we couldn’t, because we are wrong, all the better to find that out and not campaign on the wrong side of an issue), but they cannot, because all of their “facts” are just made up. Then we can say “you don’t have to believe me, you just have to believe 99% of all the experts in this field”

    • !o! says:

      and just wait till prison/justice costs start ballooning, which they will, contrary to Vic’s pretty flimsy exhortations to the contrary.

      • Tim Sullivan says:

        He won’t be around to see it. Lots of the damage will be underway while these Cons are long gone.

  10. Michael Behiels says:

    The NRA and the gun industry in the United States have spent billions of dollars convincing uneducated, poor Americans – over half the US population – that the state is their enemy. Americans are now convinced that they must be armed, not only in their homes, but also in public spaces. The NRA and the gun industry bought off the politicians at both the state and federal levels to head off any tough on guns legislation and regulations. American citizens are now paying the ultimate prices for this craziness. They are loosing lives at the rate of 10,000 casualties a year, not to mention the thousand more injuries.

    A majority of naive Americans are now convinced they must arm themselves to the teeth for Armageddon against the state and all their neighbours who support the so-called threatening state.

    If all the Americans (and they were in a majority in the 1980s) in favour of banning all hand guns and putting tough limits on very powerful, automatic long guns had the political courage and the billions to spend on convincing Americans of their side of the gun issue, then perhaps their politicians might have screwed up their courage and done something pragmatic about the emerging crisis.

    This did not happen. And it is unlikely to happen until far more American families experience the tragic results of a) trigger happy crazies/nutters who should never have gain access to guns and other weapons; b) uneducated, poverty stricken, marginalized Americans who want to steal what the richer folks have in order to survive; or c) ideologically driven racists who are hell-bent on on a raging rampage.

    Canadians are not immune from this mind ‘disease’ as gun tragedies in Montreal and now Toronto become more numerous and more brazen. The NRA is active in Canada through many Canadian gun associations and they are generous with their time and money so that there will be no restrictions on gun ownership and use. The NRA assisted over many years the gun movement in Canada, a movement that successfully pressured the Harper Reform Party and then his CP government into dismantling of the long-gun registry and now the loosing of the gun regulations.

    Canadians can rest assured that the Harper government will not raise a finger to make tougher laws and regulations pertaining to all hang guns, legal and illegal. The police are in desperate need of much tougher laws and regulations so that the time and energy they spend on searching for and finding illegal hand guns is rewarded. The flow of illegal hand guns from the US is now a veritable torrent and if it is not stopped the number of innocent Canadians who are killed or injured through both deliberate and random gun violence will only escalate.

    This scourge will continue for an indefinite period. Many more tragedies will occur. Most will turn a blind eye to these tragedies as long as they or their families or friends are not involved.

    It will take a very long, deliberate and expensive campaign to re-educate the general public and then our not-so-courageous politicians about the necessity of banning death-delivering hang guns and powerful fully automatic long guns.

    This campaign should start now and might succeed by 2030!

  11. Michael Behiels says:

    Corrected version.

    The NRA and the gun industry in the United States have spent billions of dollars convincing uneducated, poor Americans – over half the US population – that the state is their enemy. Americans are now convinced that they must be armed, not only in their homes, but also in public spaces. The NRA and the gun industry bought off the politicians at both the state and federal levels to head off any tough on guns legislation and regulations. American citizens are now paying the ultimate prices for this craziness. They are loosing lives at the rate of 10,000 casualties a year, not to mention the thousands more who suffer serious injuries.

    A majority of naive Americans are now convinced they must arm themselves to the teeth for Armageddon against the state and all their neighbours who support the so-called threatening state.

    If all the Americans (and they were in a majority in the 1980s) in favour of banning all hand guns and putting tough limits on very powerful, automatic long guns had the political courage and the billions to spend on convincing Americans of their side of the gun issue, then perhaps their politicians might have screwed up their courage and done something pragmatic about the emerging crisis.

    This did not happen. And it is unlikely to happen until far more American families experience the tragic results of a) trigger happy crazies/nutters who should never have gain access to guns and other weapons; b) uneducated, poverty stricken, marginalized Americans who want to steal what the richer folks have in order to survive; or c) ideologically driven racists who are hell-bent on a raging rampage.

    Canadians are not immune from this mind ‘disease’ as gun tragedies in Montreal and now Toronto become more numerous and more brazen. The NRA is active in Canada through many Canadian gun associations and they are generous with their time and money so that there will be no restrictions on gun ownership and use. The NRA assisted over many years the gun movement in Canada, a movement that successfully pressured the Harper Reform Party and then his CP government into dismantling of the long-gun registry and now the loosing of the gun regulations.

    Canadians can rest assured that the Harper government will not raise a finger to make tougher laws and regulations pertaining to all hang guns, legal and illegal. The police are in desperate need of much tougher laws and regulations so that the time and energy they spend on searching for and finding illegal handguns is rewarded. The flow of illegal handguns from the US is now a veritable torrent and if it is not stopped the number of innocent Canadians who are killed or injured through both deliberate and random gun violence will only escalate.

    This scourge will continue for an indefinite period. Many more tragedies will occur. Most Americans and Canadians will turn a blind eye to these tragedies as long as they or their families or friends are not involved.

    It will take a very long, deliberate and expensive campaign to re-educate the general public and then our not-so-courageous politicians about the necessity of banning death-delivering hang guns and powerful fully automatic long guns.

    This campaign should start now and might succeed by 2030!

  12. Bil Huk says:

    i keep hearing there is no need for handguns.

    No shit?

    There’s ‘no need’ for plenty of indulgences and freedoms in this country, and none of them are rights, but there has to be some standard that must be upheld if we going to start telling citizens that you can’t do something. And that standard can’t be ‘prove to me why you should be allowed to do this’.

    The standard has to be ‘prove to me why you should be allowed to stop me from doing something i’m allowed to do’.

    you can prove why i should be forced to wear a seatbelt even if i don’t want to, you can prove that allowing unregulated access to firearms is very dangerous to society, the same way that unregulated access to the roads as a driver is dangerous. you can prove that access to cocaine, smack, and meth is dangerous to society (incidentially you can’t prove the same things about pot ).

    I don’t like the reality, but the reality is you can ban every legal handgun in this country and have absolutely no long term effect on the access or price of illegal guns in Canada. It sucks that 90% of us live within 2 hours of a country with 223 MILLION FIREARMS, but we do, its so naive to think that a black market that sees supply limited and prices increase, won’t IMMEDIATELY try and obtain more of those scarce items so they can make even more money, which replaces the supply and rebalances the price, especially if you can access a virtually unlimited amount of that scarce item. There is virtually an unlimited number of guns just across the street from us. Its just math.

    its like saying if we stopped producing oil in Canada, there’d be less oil in canada for consumers to crud up the environment with. Its just gonna come from somewhere else because there’s a significant demand for it.

    So what this boils down to is ideological warfare, which is everyone’s new favorite pastime. My fellow conservatives say that same sex marriage is deterimental to society and the traditional family, but they can’t prove it, and neither can i. So i might think that its a slippery slope (and i won’t even get into it), but that’s my own personal bias that i can’t prove so when someone asks me if i’m in favour of same sex marriage i can honestly say i’m not, but i have no reason that you shouldn’t ba allowed to marry someone of the same sex.

    what would make me a real dick is if i couldn’t prove something, but insisted that it was right nonetheless and that other people’s lives should be affected because of a personal preference i have, that i can’t prove.

    And its the same thing with this issue. You may HATE the fact that there’s Canadians that have hand guns at home, but until a coherant, proof is a proof argument can be made, its the price of living in a country where someone hating what you do isn’t reason enough to stop you from doing it.

    We all benefit from that principle, and we all suffer when its tossed aside, especially for purely ideological reasons.

    • Mike Foulds says:

      I offer only this as proof:

      Rank Countries Amount
      # 1 South Africa: 31,918
      # 2 Colombia: 21,898
      # 3 Thailand: 20,032
      # 4 United States: 9,369
      # 5 Philippines: 7,708
      # 6 Mexico: 2,606
      # 7 Slovakia: 2,356
      # 8 El Salvador: 1,441
      # 9 Zimbabwe: 598
      # 10 Peru: 442
      # 11 Germany: 269
      # 12 Czech Republic: 181
      # 13 Ukraine: 173
      # 14 Canada: 144
      # 15 Albania: 135
      # 16 Costa Rica: 131
      # 17 Azerbaijan: 120
      # 18 Poland: 111
      # 19 Uruguay: 109
      # 20 Spain: 97
      # 21 Portugal: 90
      # 22 Croatia: 76
      # 23 Switzerland: 68
      # 24 Bulgaria: 63
      # 25 Australia: 59
      # 26 Sweden: 58
      # 27 Bolivia: 52
      # 28 Japan: 47
      # 29 Slovenia: 39
      = 30 Belarus: 38
      = 30 Hungary: 38
      # 32 Latvia: 28
      # 33 Burma: 27
      # 34 Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of: 26
      # 35 Austria: 25
      # 36 Estonia: 21
      # 37 Moldova: 20
      # 38 Lithuania: 16
      = 39 United Kingdom: 14
      = 39 Denmark: 14
      # 41 Ireland: 12
      # 42 New Zealand: 10
      # 43 Chile: 9
      # 44 Cyprus: 4
      # 45 Morocco: 1
      = 46 Oman: 0
      = 46 Luxembourg: 0
      = 46 Iceland: 0
      Total: 100,693
      Weighted average: 2,097.8

      DEFINITION: Total recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm. Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.

      SOURCE: The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention) via NationMaster

      Country Guns per 100 residents (2007)
      United States 88.8
      Serbia 58.2
      Yemen 54.8
      Switzerland 45.7
      Cyprus 36.4
      Saudi Arabia 35
      Iraq 34.2
      Finland 32
      Uruguay 31.8 9
      Sweden 31.6 10
      Norway 31.3 11
      France 31.2 12
      Canada 30.8 13
      Austria 30.4 14
      Iceland 30.3 15
      Germany 30.3 15
      Oman 25.5 17
      Bahrain 24.8 18
      Kuwait 24.8 18
      Macedonia 24.1 20

      I don’t believe it is the guns….but for every gun you want we should invest the equivalent amount of money (gun cost) into social programs. Make the gun owners pay it as a tax. In twenty years we can discuss the results on gun crime.

      Sound fair?

      • Phiip MacQuarrie says:

        I like this idea. Collecting and shooting handguns and restricted firearms is a hobby indulged in by a few Canadians yet some costs are paid by many. Time for Canadian communities to stop subsidizing that hobby. I’m also convinced that handguns and restricted firearms stored in private residences and possess significant risk to the communities they are in. Remove them from private residences and re-locate them to a gun club or firing range.

      • Bil H says:

        you’ve acknowledged its not the guns, which i agree with, and while the gun owners will howl with anger, this philosophy has been used with alcohol and cars and all kinds of other regulated freedoms in society.

        if only other Canadians could be so creative and interested in a solution to a problem instead of scoring points against an ideological rival.

        As a right of centre voter with lots of relatives that own guns, love your post.

        thanks for taking the time to share it.

  13. Kelly says:

    I think it is pretty obvious — and statistics bear this out — fewer guns = fewer violent deaths. The alternative weaponry commonly used on the streets isn’t as deadly. If you can’t understand this, and STILL argue that banning handguns and reducing their numbers is a bad a idea, not only are you an idiot — you’re a sociopath. But then again, in my experience, most conservative Libertarians either really aren’t that convinced of their positions and change their minds once you present them with evidence, or they really are sociopaths and are ultimately seen as sort of nerdy cranks you either ignore, or laugh at — you know, the sort of guys who get rejected by the pretty girl at the grade 7 dance, and never get over it. I wonder who in the current government fits that description?

    • Bil H says:

      statistics support your point in coutries where the primary gun supply is domestic. our’s isn’t. its not a scarce resource in Canada, and the primary supplier isn’t Canadian. they’re stolen in canada because they have a market value, which has been established by imported illegal guns, not because people can’t obtain them.

      it literally doesn’t make any sense. No market, black or otherwise, works like people are suggesting when they say you’ll reduce the number of illegal handguns by banning handguns in Toronto. Toronto is 2 1/2 hours from the border of a country that has 223 million guns lying around.

      Most Canadians don’t know this. LITERALLY, you drive to Vermont (not Tennessee, or Texas, or Arizona, just little ol’ Vermont in the North East, fully Democratic stronghold, google maps says its a 8 hour car ride from my house), where there is no state permit to purchase, no firearm registration for long guns or hand guns, no assault weapons laws, no owners license required, no carry permits (you can carry a concealed weapon without any registration). You can buy as many guns as you can, all the handguns and assault rifles as you want, and now your only struggle is getting them across the border without getting caught.

      that’s one dummy in a car with a wad of cash. think of what organized crime is capable of with established smuggling distribution channels, targeting large caches of weapons in the US for theft so the only cost to sell illegal guns to Canadian thugs is the cost of transporting them here.

      reducing the number of illegal handguns is a GREAT idea, reducing the DEMAND for illegal handguns is an even better idea. Banning legal handguns in Canada doesn’t provide a mouse fart’s worth of progress to either end. Call us unlucky due to geography.

      • Think Again says:

        Uh-huh. Well, again, I bet folks advanced all these same ‘It’s futile to even try’ protests against banning fully automatic weapons & large-capacity clips back in the 90s, but as I pointed out here http://warrenkinsella.com/2012/07/if-you-dont-favour-a-ban-on-private-ownership-of-handguns-youre-a-fucking-idiot/#comment-80647 before :

        1) no one (except possibly the overly complacent CPC & gunnutz) is maintaining that we shouldn’t be stepping up border controls in a big way to combat that smuggling; &

        2) by and large, the fully automatic weapon ban HAS worked. (And, before you counter that was because the US banned assault weapons for 10 years, that was only for newly manufactured ones after 1994, not for used ones; & that expired in 2004).

        As it is, I just see a lot of so-called ‘law-abiding’ types that seem content to run interference on any serious attempt to actually combat the problem of gun violence they pretend to decry, too.

        • Bil H says:

          its not ‘it’s futile to even try’, its “make a compelling enough case that justifies taking away a legal activity from tens of thousands of Canadians”.

          i support a assault weapon and high cap ban, i don’t think its that difficult to make a case that says that given the number of owners, grandfathered ownership for legal registered owners, and the potential danger of an assault rifles relative to a pistol, you have a real argument that most reasonable people can get behind, including me.

          but i haven’t seen anyone make that case with handguns, and frankly its difficult to make it when about 1/3rd of all homicides are committed with a firearm, which is roughly 200 people per year, AND FALLING. In 10 years it could be 2/3rds of that, without telling law abiding Canadians that they’ll be criminals next year if they have a registered handgun.

          Affecting thousands of law abiding Canadians, to cut that number in half at the absolute best, when its falling on its own, isn’t compelling enough IMHO.

          we’re not runny interference on serious attempts to combat gun violence. Frankly a handgun ban is not really a serious attempt. Other than Warren, who sounds like he owns a handgun, the vast majority of the people that suggest a ban aren’t affected by it. that’s not ‘serious’, it’s ‘convenient’.

          also, the insinuation that i support gun violence was a really nice touch. Classy.

  14. wsam says:

    Banning or more tightly regulating handguns and bringing back the long gun registry are small things the state (and only the state) can do as part of efforts to prevent more gun crime. Restricting access and registering are not a solution themselves. They are one aspect of the solution. Guns exist. But making them harder to get is one way, among many ways, to help reduce their being used to murder people. The harder task is to change a culture which starts shoot-outs at neighbourhood bar-B-ques. Part of changing that culture is getting law-abiding right-wingers to stop fetishizing guns to the point they won’t even tolerate having them registered.

    Toronto also might want to revist the wisdom of our current approach to social housing. It is clearly not working as intended. A present, isolated pockets of socially excluded individuals, mired in poverty and violent nihilism seems to be what we are creating.

  15. wsam says:

    Harper’s Conservatives aren’t just trying to make Canada a worse place. We are trying to make Asia and Africa worse as well. Because it is good politics in Canada. They have been quietly helping the NRA in the US fight the proposed United Nations arms trade treaty. Thanks Canada!!!

    How do you trace political donations?

    This article in Foreign Policy Magazine (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/23/the_world_in_its_sights) details how the NRA is taking their fight global.

    Recently they sent paid consultants to Brazil to fight against a proposed gun registry there. Brazilian anti-gun law literature had been directly cut and pasted from American literature. The article quotes Charles Cunningham, one of the group’s best Washington advocates, who was dispatched to Brazil. “Ignorance and emotion are key issues for us to address with logic and common sense,” he said at an August 14, 2003, meeting of the Pro Legitima Defensa campaign.

    I wonder what links Charles Cunningham has with the Canadian anti-gun control lobby or the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. FYI: Harper’s Conservatives demanded that a representative from The Canadian Shooting Sports Association be included in Canada’s official delegation to the UN arms trade treaty conference. This is the same association whose anti-gun control literature includes stuff cut and pasted from existing NRA pamplets and is alleged to have close ties to the NRA; and, of course, was a leading advocate of dismantaling of Canada’s gun registry.

    Thanks Harper!

  16. Henry says:

    The people who have proven that a gun ban for private citizens works great!

    Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Khmer Rouge, Castro, Chavez, Mao Etc; Etc; Etc.

    So far 200 million private unarmed citizens murdered at the hands of their loving leaders, in the twentieth century alone!

    Stick that in your insane leftist pipe and smoke it!

    Only fools give up their rights for imaginary safety.

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