On June 13, 2016, Barack Obama addressed his nation about a mass shooting for the 15th time in his seven-and-a-half years as president of the United States.
That is not even the most appalling or horrifying thing about gun violence in the U.S. The worst thing is the president reserves nationally televised statements for only the most egregious of these events. If he had to address all of them, that would be his full time job.
The killing spree at an Orlando nightclub Sunday night was not even the only mass shooting—defined as an incident in which four or more people are killed or injured by firearm—last weekend. On Saturday, five people were killed in Roswell New Mexico. Five more were gunned down—three dead, two injured—in Panorama, California. A total of two more died and 10 were injured in three other attacks in Minnesota, California and North Carolina.
Orlando was by far the worst, with 50 dead and 49 injured, but it was only one of 133 incidents up to that point in 2016. It is currently Wednesday morning, the day we go to press. There have been five more mass shootings since Orlando. By the time you read this editorial, odds are very good there will have been one or two more.
The death toll from mass shootings is now more than 200 for this year alone and that does not even touch on the one-off gun murders, which now number over 5,000 well on their way to a typical year of more than 10,000.
And it’s not just Americans. There are people right here in Canada, particularly in this part of Canada, who want us to adopt the American model of gun control, i.e., none whatsoever. That is insane.
The News Review is not advocating stricter gun control for Canada, merely that we maintain the status quo, which is a reasonable compromise between respect for heritage activities and maintaining public safety. Canadian gun control laws are not even that strict by comparison with other developed countries.
In 2015, more than two million Canadians had firearms licences. Almost a million restricted or prohibited weapons were registered.
But while Americans have racked up 138, or more, mass shootings this year, we have had exactly one, January 22 in La Loche.
Canadians are not particularly nicer than Americans and we are not particularly less violent. Our violence is simply not as deadly because we don’t have unrestricted access to firearms of all kinds.
How much more deadly could La Loche have been if the perpetrator could have walked into any gun shop and legally walked out with a semi-automatic assault rifle and as much ammo as he wanted as the Orlando shooter was able to do?
The fact of the matter is, there is a direct correlation between gun control and gun death. The United States, with virtually no gun control, has a firearms murder rate of nearly 11 per 100,000 population every year. Canada’s rate, with moderate gun control, is just under two. The United Kingdom with very strict gun control only clocks around 0.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people.
Are Britons less violent than Americans? Assault statistics that put Scotland at the very top of the heap among developed nations say otherwise.
Yes, there will always be people who should not have guns, who will get hold of them. Such was the case in La Loche where the killer used someone else’s shotgun and in Edmonton in 2014 when a mentally unstable individual used a stolen gun to murder eight family members.
Guns do not cause mental illness, religious extremism or other underlying reasons for gun violence, but the gun problem exacerbates these other problems. Yes, the United States has a gun problem.
In May, Bob Zimmer, a Conservative MP from northern B.C. tabled a petition in Parliament to make the AR-15, the very same weapon used by the Orlando gunman, unrestricted in Canada. He even had the gall to say the justification is “so we can once again use this rifle to lawfully participate in the Canadian cultural practices of hunting in Canada.”
The thing is the AR-15 is not illegal in Canada, it is merely restricted. You can buy one if you pass the background check, register it and only use it for target practice on a range. As it should be with all military-style weapons.
Please, people of Yorkton, Saskatchewanians, Canadians, let’s be reasonable. We may not want to emulate the U.K., but we certainly do not want to take after the United States.
