People kill people
Re: Banning Guns Won’t Help, editorial, July 20. Jamaica, the U.K. and Australia have all banned handguns, in the hopes of reducing violent crime. Instead, these countries experienced significant increases in violent crime. Remember that these are island nations that cannot easily blame the increase on smuggling from an adjacent country.
Americans buy millions of handguns every year. Over the past couple of decades, most states have begun to allow ordinary people to carry handguns for self-defense. Yet the crime rate has been steadily declining over the same time period.
Gun bans do nothing to stop bad people from acquiring guns and using them to do bad things. Meanwhile, the ban takes away a valuable self-defence tool from the innocent.
Tricia Simmons, Toronto. Re: Guns Claim Fourth Victim In Four Days; 30th Homicide, July 20. The issue that arises following a rash of shootings in Toronto is whether we need more police. I can assure you we do not. What we do need is more cops doing real police work.
Riddle me this: Does it make sense to have 50% or more of your well-paid police officers sitting on side streets in the hopes of catching people making an incorrect turn, or other offences that could well be handled by a force of less expensive traffic cops. Or does it make more sense to have them out on the streets, creating a real presence and potentially rounding up guns and saving lives?
Today it was reported proudly that our police had removed 90+ guns from the streets this year — what a laugh when we know there must be hundreds.
We have it backwards, the police should not be, and were never, intended to be a revenue generating agency.
Nicholas Brooks, Toronto. Ontario attorney-general John Gerretsen is calling for a handgun ban to deal with the recent violence in Toronto. Strangely, he’s not suggesting we should ban gang members from having guns. He means legal owners, since gangbangers are already barred from owning weapons.
Mr. Gerretsen says that killing people is the only purpose of owning a handgun. If that is the case, why are they issued to Toronto police officers? Is it to kill people? The attorney-general asked a reporter yesterday: “Why does anyone need a handgun?” Since he obviously wasn’t referring to gangbangers with his question, I’ll throw it back at him: Why do police need handguns? Could the reason be self-defence? It’s time we stop using every tragedy as an excuse to ignore the obvious. We have a criminal problem, not a gun problem.
Keith Linton, Orono, Ont.