National Post (National Edition)
Liberals add more gun ‘ban’ incoherence
No studies show how many are killed by various firearms
In a recent column, I questioned whether the Liberals’ new “ban” on certain kinds of semi-automatic rifles — “ban” in quotation marks, inasmuch as current owners can keep them — constituted the sort of good public-health policy we’re demanding nowadays in the face of COVID-19. I concluded it did not. Even if you support the idea of banning such weapons, you can’t really support this endeavour except in the way a starving man might welcome his least favourite meal. Indeed, gun control advocates are nearly as annoyed by it as gun rights advocates, and rightly so.
The Liberal “ban” targets certain semi-automatic rifles falling under the undefined term “military-style,” while leaving other semi-automatics alone. It focuses on rifles, which collectively are the least lethal form of previously legal weapons, while leaving handguns — which are used in 65 per cent of firearm homicides — alone. “You don’t need an AR15 to bring down a deer,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says, yet the “ban” exempts current owners of these weapons who use them to hunt for the purposes of sustenance.” Upon its unveiling, it was very nearly perfectly incoherent. And it’s nearer still now.
In recent days the Liberals have touted the “ban” as a way of protecting women and girls in particular. “These guns make it easier to commit mass murder,” Trudeau added. “And the culture around their fetishization makes our country inherently more dangerous for the people most vulnerable. And that is women and girls.” Trudeau cited reports about increasing domestic violence during the pandemic, and grim statistics about the number of Canadians killed by their spouses.
There is very little evidence to support this case for the “ban.” And when you go looking for it, you wind up only with more questions.
To be fair, there is very little evidence to support any position on gun control. Nobody comprehensively keeps track of how many Canadians are killed using currently restricted weapons, or by the weapons the Liberals are “banning,” or even by rifles as opposed to shotguns — so we certainly don’t know how many men and women are killed by these various kinds of firearms.
We can probably figure out how many men and women are killed using the categories of weapons into which Statistics Canada sorts them: handguns, rifles and shotguns combined, fully automatic weapons and other firearms. But a spokesperson says the agency is currently operating under “an emergency framework” due to the pandemic, and is unable to perform such custom tabulations. According
to Statistics Canada’s public data, between 2014 and 2018, 68 per cent of the 2,576 Canadians murdered using all sorts of guns combined were male, so it seems unlikely that a more detailed analysis by type of firearm would lead to the conclusion that women are disproportionately victims of any kind of gun violence the Liberals claim to be targeting.
It is true that for domestic violence, between 2008 and 2017, 19 per cent of homicides were committed by the victim’s current or former spouse or intimate partner, and roughly 80 per cent of those victims were female. Other domestic relationships — parents, siblings, etc. — account for another 19 per cent of homicides, but in those cases nearly 60 per cent of the victims were male.
Even if you just focused on spousal homicide, though, guns simply aren’t very commonly used in those crimes. Between 1995 and 2009, according to data Statistics Canada provided to Gary Mauser, an emeritus criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, 28 per cent of spousal homicides with female victims were committed using firearms. The majority of those were with long guns, but we have no idea how many of those were “military style” and now “banned.” It’s probably not very many. Meanwhile, eight per cent of those homicides were committed with handguns, which the Liberals have no intention of banning at the federal level!
As for Canada’s history of mass murderers, while several were seething misogynists, the victims are far from monolithically women. Nine of Gabriel Wortman’s victims in Nova Scotia, which is clearly the impetus for the Liberals finally acting on this file, were men. All six Muslim worshippers Alexandre Bissonnette cut down at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City in 2017 were men. (One wonders why the Liberals didn’t act on their campaign promise then.) Psychotic Concordia University engineering professor Valery Fabrikant gunned down four colleagues in 1992, all men.
Fabrikant, incidentally, used three pistols. Faisal Hussain, who killed two young women on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue in 2018, used a .40-calibre handgun. Wortman and Bissonnette used handguns in addition to “military-style” rifles — indeed, Bissonnette was licensed to own them and had them properly registered. He might be the single best example a government ideologically committed to ramping up gun control could cite: “See? Sometimes ‘law-abiding gun owners’ do commit unspeakable acts. Licensing isn’t enough. We must prohibit their use altogether.”
I wouldn’t find that a particularly convincing argument. But the fact they aren’t even bothering with it, and are instead trying to sell this hot mess on well-meaning gun owners and anti-gun advocates alike, says just about everything you need to know about this profoundly unserious government and how stupid they think we all are.
THERE IS VERY
LITTLE EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT ANY POSITION.