We must take greater aim at legal guns, too
The problem is bigger and more complex than gangs and smuggled weapons, Heidi Rathjen writes.
In a recent opinion piece in the Gazette, Concordia political science associate professor Noah Schwartz says calls for gun bans are among typical “knee-jerk” reactions to gun violence that “drain precious resources” that could be better invested in long-term solutions to crime and violence in Canada.
Schwartz seems to have accepted the argument — often presented by the gun lobby — that gun violence is mostly limited to criminal gangs “in specific neighbourhoods” and that “licensed, vetted” gun owners are already “heavily regulated” enough.
It's ironic that such a claim is being made by someone teaching at the very same university where four professors were killed by one of those licensed gun owners — incidentally one who learned to shoot at the same gun club as the Dawson mass shooter. The Dawson, Polytechnique, Metropolis and Quebec mosque shootings also involved legal gun owners.
It's true that we are facing emerging armed gang violence in Montreal, often involving smuggled handguns, and of course this needs to be addressed. The recent injection of $90 million to fight illegal guns by the Quebec government is a good first step.
However, gang violence is responsible for only half of gun murders, according to Statistics Canada. Are spousal homicides, mass shootings and police killings — mostly committed with long guns — not as important?
A short internet search reveals that many official reports showing that crime guns vary substantially from one location to another. For example, while the majority of guns seized in Toronto are smuggled, this is not true for Quebec or western provinces, where most seized firearms are long guns, often stolen from legal gun owners.
Handguns, assault weapons and large capacity magazines are designed to kill people, and that's why victims of crimes committed with these weapons are calling on the government to ban them. Their risks outweigh their benefits. Indeed, most Canadians agree that the cost to buy back assault weapons is a worthwhile investment in a safer future that avoids the frequent mass shootings we see south of the border.
Consider the following while pondering the claim that our gun control laws “have hit a point of diminishing returns”:
■ Most assault weapons were technically prohibited in May 2020, but nothing has really changed on the ground: these tens of thousands of military-style weapons remain in the hands of their current owners.
■ There's been no new measure since 1951 to rein in the proliferation of handguns, now numbered at more than one million and increasing exponentially with record growth in sales. In fact, more than half of current handguns circulating in Canada were purchased in the past 10 years.
■ Contrary to the oft-quoted argument that Canada's two million gun owners are “vetted daily” by the Firearms Incident Police (FIP) system, incidents that should be flagged are not systematically entered into the system in many provinces, resulting in preventable deaths, especially domestic homicides.
Unlike the U.S., which has an extensive, uniform and centralized gun tracing program, Canada's gun tracing data consists of incomplete and one-time piecemeal investigations, made more difficult by the destruction of the longgun registry and the failure to centralize commercial sales records (which are not even implemented despite a law to that effect passed in 2019).
As a political science professor, Schwartz might want to examine the motives of the gun lobby behind their insistence on focusing on gang violence to the exclusion of everything else. It's pretty simple: to bolster their opposition to any and all stricter gun control. Indeed, a broader view of this complex and multi-layered problem would be much more helpful in advancing solutions that we all agree on, including those proposed by Schwartz, like local violence interruption programs, as well as addressing root causes of crime and violence.
Prevention through stronger gun control and fighting illegal guns need not be mutually exclusive.