National Post (National Edition)
Evidence-based policy works with COVID-19, why not with guns?
With more than a week passed since Canada’s worstever mass shooting, the Nova Scotia RCMP have let us in on a few details, including with respect to the murderer’s weaponry. Police seem fairly certain that Gabriel Wortman used multiple rifles and at least one handgun, that some originated in the United States, and that he was unlicensed to own any kind of firearm at all. They are quite rightly keen to determine where and how he obtained those weapons, not least because it may have involved someone else committing a crime, and to divine his motives, to whatever extent such an act can ever be explained.
By rights, this should be society’s major focus as well.
The horror seems to have begun with an act of domestic violence, which does not seem to have been altogether out of Wortman’s character. Especially at the moment, amid reports of significant spikes in domestic violence around the world, that seems like a worthy avenue of inquiry and response. There aren’t scores of spree killers out there just waiting to snap, but there are certainly many victims and potential victims of abuse who could be helped.
“The emotional, physical and social scars from domestic abuse can last a lifetime,” Yvette Cooper, chair of the British Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee, warned on Monday. “If we don’t act to tackle it now, we will feel the consequences of rising abuse during the coronavirus crisis for many years to come.” Maryam Monsef, Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality, fittingly described the situation a “powder keg.”
Instead, just as the sun rises in the east, we are talking a whole lot about gun control. It’s not clear whether the Nova Scotia gunman used a “military-style assault rifle” — which isn’t a defined term anyway — but the federal Liberals are under renewed pressure from various advocacy groups to outlaw them, as they have pledged to do, although they haven’t specified exactly which rifles they will target. Hunters, farmers and other non-murderers are understandably concerned their weapons will be caught in the net, and aggrieved at the idea of being implicitly blamed for a perfect stranger’s horrific crimes.
We’re hearing a lot these days about evidence-based policy. Most of us have probably thought more about public-health measures in the past month than in our entire pre-COVID-19 lives. We should hope that the care and discretion that helped design our current dystopia will go into every decision our governments make to limit Canadians’ freedoms. So let’s think this through: Does the Liberals’ proposal amount to a good public-health approach to gun violence?
We know in broad strokes what kinds of guns are used to create havoc. Between 2014 and 2018, an average of 215 people were murdered with a gun in Canada every year, representing about 35 per cent of total homicides. At minimum 75 per cent of victims were killed with weapons the Liberals do not propose banning — mostly handguns, which were used in 65 per cent of homicides. Just 25 per cent of victims were killed with a shotgun or rifle. Some small subset of those would be covered by the Liberals’ ban.
If we accept that “banning” certain weapons can save lives — and polls suggest most Canadians do — it’s clear that no coherent public-health approach can possibly focus on a minority of long guns while neglecting the issue of handguns. An Angus Reid poll conducted last year found roughly two-thirds of respondents supported not just banning handgun ownership, but a taxpayer-funded handgun buyback program. The Liberals’ answer is to empower municipalities to ban handguns, which bespeaks a reluctance that can only be political or economic. (However many “military-style” weapons there are in Canada, there are vastly more handguns.)
Then there’s the matter of the United States of America, where Wortman and so many other criminals get their weapons, either directly or indirectly. It is often observed that this cross-border flow would be impossible to stop entirely, but it’s a safe bet it’s pretty much stopped right now.
Is it worth crippling the Canadian economy to slow the border to a crawl in search of smuggled weapons? Most Canadians would probably say no — but as we’re seeing right now, it’s simply a matter of how badly we want it to happen. If we don’t want to go that far, knowing there is a near-limitless stock of guns just waiting to be brought across, it does not follow that we should infringe upon harmless, law-abiding gun owners’ freedoms. It certainly does not follow that we should inconvenience the owners of certain long guns, while leaving handgun owners unmolested.
As a public safety measure against gun violence, these ideas make no more sense than harassing someone kicking a ball around with his son, or sitting on a park bench, in the name of fighting COVID-19. We can’t all “be in this together,” as we keep hearing, if one man’s act of savagery is used as an excuse to outlaw unpopular hobbies.