New Liberal changes will disarm law-abiding, non-violent Canadians. That's the goal. It always has been
Canadian progressives see themselves, in contrast to conservatives, as being swayed by evidence. Best practices. Data. Last summer, a long-running Canadian public policy debate was turned on its head by new information. The new data reshaped national and local debates in Canada — we saw this again in the recent Throne Speech by the governor-general.
The new information was wrong.
It related to gun control. Gang-related violence has surged in Canada in recent years. Much of the violence involves firearms. Where the gangs get their guns is a matter of obvious concern. If Canadian criminals are getting their guns from legal Canadian sources, that indicates that our gun control laws are insufficient. If they’re getting them from external sources — primarily smuggling from the United States, which is awash in guns — then it’s not a gun control problem, and changing our gun control laws won’t help.
Data and police experience had long shown that Canadian crime gangs were arming themselves with guns sourced to the U.S., sold here at massive markups. But in the summer of 2018, The Canadian Press wire service ran a story that told the public that this long-observed trend was no longer true. It reported that the number of crime guns that were sourced in Canada had “surged dramatically,” according to a detective with the Toronto police, and that Canadian guns were now roughly equal with smuggled American guns on Toronto’s streets — basically a 50-50 split.
It was a major shift in the old debate, and really did suggest that Canada’s generally tight gun laws weren’t tight enough. It had an immediate and obvious impact on elected officials. Municipal politicians in Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere seized on the stat, demanding a national ban on handguns (handguns are tightly controlled in Canada, but can be purchased by some individuals, who have passed various background checks and comply with numerous regulations). The NDP has said it would ban handguns. The Liberals haven’t gone quite that far, saying that they would give local jurisdictions the ability to impose their own bans, but would not ban them nationally.
The Canadian Press story was wrong. It didn’t take long for the single-source’s central claim to be completely discredited. The Toronto Police Service’s own internal information, obtained via freedom of information requests, showed no “dramatic surge” in legally owned Canadian guns being used in crimes. Most guns used in crimes have their serial numbers destroyed and cannot be traced. Of those that could be traced, the Toronto data actually showed the number of guns being traced back to Canadian owners was, with some annual variation, trending down over time.
Almost exactly a year ago, several months after the first article, The Canadian Press interviewed a different Toronto cop who confirmed that handguns used in crime in Toronto, and that can be traced, are still mostly traced back to the U.S. In a year-end press conference on Friday, Toronto police chief Mark Saunders confirmed that remains true, with updated figures — a whopping 82 per cent of traceable guns used by criminals in Toronto have been smuggled in from the U.S.
But the focus on legal guns continues. That might have made sense if it really was a 50-50 split. But it’s not, and never was or has been. The evidence continues to be that the recent spike of gang-related shootings in our major cities is being sustained by guns from the U.S., but the Liberals want to spend hundreds of millions buying back rifles (including tens of thousands of mundane hunting rifles) and further restricting legal handgun ownership.
The progressive dislike of handguns and certain kinds of rifles in Canada isn’t a public policy issue. It’s an ideological preference. Millions of Canadians do not understand how tight our laws already are, how they could be reasonably improved, have no interest in shooting sports and cannot fathom why anyone would feel differently. They’d rather live in a country with fewer guns. For a brief moment last year, there was a news story that gave their cause ammunition, but even when that story was completely debunked, the focus on legal guns remained. This isn’t about gun control. It’s dislike for guns and gun owners.
That’s fine. We’re all entitled to our views. But it’s important we be honest. The changes the Liberals will soon bring down will cost hundreds of millions of tax dollars, anger and inconvenience thousands of citizens and devastate a thriving sports shooting industry, but won’t stop the shootings in our cities, or, Canadian data suggests, reduce suicides. It’ll just disarm law-abiding, non-violent Canadians. That’s the goal. It always has been.
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