Saturday columnist fires up gun debate

Taylor’s column was ‘immaterial bombast’

Re: Two kinds of gun control needed (Jim Taylor column, Feb. 20)

Let me make it clear that I have never owned a firearm and likely never will. I did not grow up in family that owned firearms or hunted (but yes I have fished if that counts).

But I do have experience with firearms in that I served for a brief period in the Canadian Army Reserve and got training in semi-automatic and fully automatic rifles, machine guns and pistols.

What I care about is logical argument and Taylor’s piece is not only nonsense but deliberately misleading in more than one place.

Never mind that he makes it perfectly clear that he … “can’t understand why anyone in a modern society needs to hunt wild game for food. And (he) will never understand how hunters can derive pleasure from killing something” and then pretends the argument he presents is based on logic rather than this personal point of view.

The opposition to the new gun-control legislation is not principally based on an urban/rural split, although I concede such a divide does exist, but rather in the crass politics of pandering to a core political base after torquing the debate. This legislation is nothing but an attempt at wedge politics.

The alleged core issue is (mostly urban) gun violence, as stated in the column. It is not about Taylor’s peculiar judgments about hunting. (It’s immaterial bombast).

Notwithstanding the minuscule percentage of gun-related deaths that are done with legal weapons, this legislation has been presented to the (mostly urban) public as an important solution to gang-related firearm-related shootings and deaths, which for the vast majority are committed by illegal weapons. It is ludicrous to suggest this legislation will have any impact whatsoever on the very issue that urban dwellers are mostly and rightly concerned about and that is gang-related firearms violence.

The majority of all gang firearm use is from weapons smuggled into Canada from the U.S. When you put side by side the sentences “Urban gangs smuggle high-powered weapons from the U.S. Urban gangs steal legal guns and use them illegally,” you engage in the fraudulent attempt to suggest there is one sort of numerical equivalency. This is sloppy and shameful journalism. Does Taylor have any study to support this attempt at equivalency? I doubt it because the data is quite clear.

Equally fallacious is Taylor’s assertion criminalizing possession will make it easier to identify who the criminals are. The only people who are known to own the now-criminalized weapons are the people who have heretofore been in legal possession of the weapons.

Gangs don’t notify police of the weapons they have and this not likely to change under the new legislation. The only way Taylor’s sentence on this could possibly make sense is if the owners of now criminalized weapons would suddenly become gang members and engage gangrelated firearm violence. What an ignorant thing to say in the absence of any serious sociological study.

Shameful and sloppy journalism. Taylor’s conjectures are nothing more than wishful thinking. Good God, where were the editors?

G.E. Swaters, West Kelowna

Has Taylor not heard of shooting sports?

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: Two kinds of gun control needed (Jim Taylor column, Feb. 20)

I’d like to point out some of the erroneous assumptions and errors made by Jim Taylor in his Feb. 20 column.

First, the NRA does not say that bullets kill people. They say that people kill people, and the tool is irrelevant since the source is violence stemming from any of a number of human behaviours, notably greed, envy, lust, anger, bitterness or hopelessness, with the additions of poverty or mental illness.

Taylor also distills Canada’s needs for gun control down to only two uses of firearms: criminal use in urban centres and hunting/predator control in rural settings.

Apparently the popularity of sport shooting with a variety of firearms has escaped his notice, even though the sport has been exponentially growing in popularity.

He presupposes that the vast majority of guns in urban areas are in the hands of gang members, are “high powered,” and smuggled in from the U.S.

Presumably Taylor’s definition of “high powered” is debatable, since I have yet to see gang members using .50 calibre Barrets, or a 20-mm cannon.

Upon the other two points we in agreement. Taylor fails to identify how the current spate of gun control legislation is going to address the urban issue. I too am completely at a loss to explain how the government, through this legislation, is going to reduce the criminal by persecuting the innocent.

Taylor is also wrong about the vast majority of guns in urban areas being in the hands of gang members. Actually the vast majority of guns in any given urban centre in Canada are in the hands of your friends and neighbours, who have been peacefully enjoying their use for decades at local ranges and shooting clubs in your areas.

Look up how many ranges there are in any given Canadian city. Some of you will no doubt be shocked. Many of these ranges and clubs in larger urban centres have an extensive waiting list for membership.

Taylor also seems to base his experience of hunting on a single childhood accident, as if that should invalidate the thousands of Canadian hunters who routinely enjoy the challenge and skill of hunting every year.

Taylor also refers to the issue surrounding legal guns falling into criminal hands, either through straw purchase or through theft. This is an oft-used saw of gun control advocates and is almost universally relayed without any statistics or information to verify the statement.

This is because we already have a working system to pick up straw purchasers that works very well — this is how you heard about straw purchases in the first place.

Both straw purchases and theft of legal firearms that are subsequently used in a criminal activity are so exceedingly rare in Canada as to be a statistical zero (see Statistics Canada for further information).

At the end of the day, firearms have been, and remain, an important part of Canadian culture, and gun control laws rarely achieve their stated objective.

Neil Batchelor, Calgary