Stop coddling crime and gun love: Ban handguns

We’re off to the races on public meetings about a possible federal handgun ban. Toronto, which recently saw a gun attack on the Danforth, is a city where gun deaths, especially in poorer parts of the city, are so tragically frequent that they’re reported but don’t cause much comment.

Toronto doesn’t want to get used to death by handgun. In June, two little girls were shot and severely injured in a Scarborough playground, possibly by two gunmen hunting down a fleeing rival, I repeat, in a playground.

The mother of the girls asked that Toronto do more to prevent young men being drawn into violence. She’s right and I honour her belief that the future can be better. At times I haven’t had that belief. She’s thinking about those alleged gunmen when they were boys. What was missing in their lives?

Some problems are easier to solve. One of them is the handgun, a small angular mechanism with a handle, a hole, a trigger and hot speeding capsules that shred human bodies. Handguns are now easy to bring across the border from the U.S., where there is daily carnage, and are easy to buy, hide, carry and use. It’s not a Canada I recognize.

The first responsibility of government is to protect citizens from violent death. Who needs a handgun in a city? I see no elk at Bay and Bloor that will provide us with meat for the winter. In the North, we used to eat moose meat all winter, shot by hunters, but with a rifle, not a handgun.

A handgun ban would be a gift to women and children moving cautiously in the world because of male violence. Polls have suggested it would be popular. Don’t assume that a ban would cause anything like the Western Canada-led rancour towards the long-gun registry, a sensible idea that was badly and expensively handled. Rural long-gun owners howled like wolves (though of course they may have been facing actual wolves at the time).

Private handguns are different. Used for crime, they are American in nature, making murder easier, faster and more thoughtless. At a Sunday Toronto public meeting on handguns that included two MPs, Border Security Minister Bill Blair, an emergency physician and others, a small group of organized gun owners screamed and frequently interrupted, even though they were as free as anyone else to speak.

They wore clothing that pictured assault rifles, not handguns. It did help explain why some people shouldn’t be allowed to own any guns at all.

Another good move: Ottawa’s long-promised move to take national gun safety rules into more modern times was slow in the making but is finally here. Bill C-71 is about to reach the Senate. To my feminist eye, the bill is in no way sufficient, but it at least restores some of the sensible rules discarded by the Harper government for ideological reasons. The RCMP rather than the government will decide which firearms should be non-restricted, restricted or prohibited. It seems sane. Previously, Harper’s cabinet could have overruled the experts in some kind of masculinity contest.

Ottawa has put more money into fighting gun smuggling at the border and illegal weapons trafficking operations. But there are other restrictions that will help women.

RCMP firearm licence applications used to require a cursory five-year background check that partly relied on honest self-reporting. But a person who selfidentifies as a paragon of good behaviour and mental health doesn’t seek psychiatric treatment, even though they may be in crisis.

As the CBC reports, the RCMP will now study the applicant’s entire life history, including criminality, mental health, domestic violence history and addiction to drugs and alcohol, and will keep records up to date and tighten gun sales records. Post-bill, Ottawa will consider a reporting system for doctors seeing fragile gun-owning patients.

Basically, the RCMP wishes to know if the gun owner “poses a risk of harm to any person.” These restored rules are a blessing for women, particularly in empty rural areas where long guns are legal, and there’s no one to hear a woman scream as a man beats her, holding a gun to her head.