We, too, have a gun problem

Data accompanying legislation shows we have little reason to be smug

It was impossible to watch the Liberal rollout of new firearms legislation Tuesday without seeing the brave survivors of the Valentine’s Day shooting in Parkland, Fla.

Or the news breaking from Maryland, where another school shooting injured two and ended with the attacker dead, the 17th school shooting in the U.S. this year, according to CNN. That’s more than one per week. Or Las Vegas. Or Orlando.

Or, closer to home, the tragic death of 29-year-old Ruma Amar, gunned down at a Toronto bowling alley Saturday night. Or 26-year-old Nnamdi Ogba, shot to death in Etobicoke the night before. That’s because Canadians often prove much more proficient in lamenting the gun lunacy to the south than taking a closer look at home.

Whether one believes gun violence statistics that accompanied the tabling of the legislation were there to provide cover or not, they are real and should get Canadians’ attention.

Canadian gun ownership, 31 firearms per 100 residents, puts this country anywhere between seventh to 15th for highest gun ownership worldwide. It is difficult to peg exactly, because the data from the Small Arms Survey is dated, although still seen as the most reliable number out there. That rate is probably higher now. And it certainly does not include illegal firearms.

Much of that firearms ownership reflects the rural nature of parts of this country, but, as Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale pointed out Tuesday, gun violence in Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces is more prevalent outside the cities.

In the past five years, gun-related homicides, gun deaths involving intimate partners, criminal gang activity and gun thefts are all up significantly.

So are the number of illicit firearms seized at the border.

Criminal violations involving firearms were up by 30 per cent from 2013-2016, and gun homicides in the same period went from 134 to 223.

Intimate-partner gun violence went up by one-third in that period and incidents of break-and-enter to steal guns jumped from 516 in 2013 to 804 in 2016.

In the Southern Ontario region, which encompasses border crossings at Windsor, Sarnia, London, Fort Erie and Niagara Falls, border agents seized 235 firearms and 627 prohibited weapons in 2017.

The government had already earmarked $327 million over five years, then $100 million per year after that to deal with gang activity, plus illegal firearm trafficking and beefing up border security.

There has been a surge of firearm imports since the Stephen Harper government dismantled the federal gun registry and ordered information collected to be destroyed in 2012.

The legislation tabled Tuesday would require those seeking to buy guns to undergo background checks for their entire lifetime, instead of the minimum five-year check now in place.

Those selling firearms would be required to keep detailed inventories and sales records (most already do) and they will be accessed by police only for due cause and after judicial oversight. That reinstates a practice that ended in 2005 when the long-gun registry was in place.

There will be those who see the retail records as a backdoor route to re-establishing a gun registry by a different name. But the Liberals have largely made good on their 2015 guncontrol reform promise, including the vow that they would not go anywhere near a gun registry again.

Justin Trudeau, while campaigning for the party leadership, called the registry a “failure.”

It was. Start-up costs ridiculously ballooned to $2 billion. It was also behind schedule, and its annual cost also soared with the Liberal government of the day being accused by Auditor-General

Sheila Fraser of misleading Canadians on costs.

Harper’s Conservatives then gleefully turned their vow to kill the registry into a fundraising instrument, then played wedge politics with it, leaving opposition MPs in rural ridings twisting in the wind.

It’s 2018, and this will be a test of a nation’s maturity. We have no reason to be smug. And there should be none of the hysterical charges of years past that the government was coming for legal guns. Crass politics should be removed from the debate. Guns are not political wedges.

Goodale said he believed his government had struck a consensus with this bill. That may be optimistic. But we should expect more civilized debate this time around because, if anything, the stakes are even higher today.