I haven’t been violently trolled, ignorantly vilified or aggressively threatened online for quite a while, so, what the heck, I guess it must be time for another gun control column.
This month, on the first to be exact, a lone gunman marched into Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon and opened fire killing nine and injuring seven before police gunned him down.
President Barack Obama quickly responded with a mixture of rage, despair and frustration. He correctly predicted that the gun lobby’s response would be America needs more guns.
It wasn’t the first time in Obama’s presidency, he has been called upon to make a statement on a mass shooting—in fact, it wasn’t even the first time in the past year.
It was the 15th time since he took office in January 2009.
But that’s not even the crazy thing. He only very rarely speaks out about mass shootings. If he did, he wouldn’t have time to be president.
There have been 994 mass shootings—defined as a gun incident in which four or more people are killed and/or injured—in the United States since Obama was reelected. That’s not in his whole time as president, just the last three years.
As of the date of the Oregon shooting, there had been 274 days in 2015 and 294 mass shootings, 45 of which have been at schools.
Clearly the United States has a massive problem with guns, but the opposition to gun control is so intractable that not even these alarming statistics give gun control advocates any hope whatsoever of changing the station.
What has this got to do with Canada?
Well, plenty actually, particularly western Canada.
Now, before you start slamming me, I am not an “anti-gun person.” You can ask my buddy Dave south of Regina whom I was out with recently sighting in the scope on his new .275 and skeet shooting. I am also not advocating in any way a return to the long-gun registry, which I opposed from the beginning.
However, perhaps to some degree just because of our proximity to our southern neighbour, gun violence in Canada is on the rise.
Canada’s homicide rate hovers somewhere around 1.6 per 100,000 people. Approximately 30 per cent of these are gun-related and 68 per cent of those are by handguns.
It is still a far cry from the ridiculous homicide rate (4.9 of which 60 per cent are shooting deaths) in the United States, but it is significantly higher than countries that we are more traditionally compared to with sensible gun control policies such as the United Kingdom and Australia, which hover around one homicide per 100,000 and only 10 per cent of which are committed with firearms.
The biggest problem for Canada is there is a very disturbing American-style gun lobby gaining ground in Canada. In a Youtube video titled Up In Arms: How the Gun Lobby is Changing Canada, one advocate for American-style deregulation, who is not identified, says: “Zero-licencing, zero-background check, full auto, concealed carry, no controls, Canada’s not ready for it, but we’ll keep fighting until they are.”
There are some areas that Canada may want to emulate the United States, but gun control policy—or rather, lack thereof—is not one of them.
The country does not need zero-licencing and zero-background checks. Canadians do not need access to handguns; fully, or even partially, automatic weapons; or concealed carry permits.
We do not need further deregulation of guns in Canada.
I hope we are never ready for the insanity these people are proposing, but if the gun lobby wins, we better also be ready for daily mass shootings.
