Gun laws make a difference
Canada has homophobia and weapons, but a fraction of U.S. mass shootings
Afriend was in a Victoria doctor’s office recently when she encountered a young man who looked as though he had been in a bad car crash.
No, he had been jumped outside a gay bar. A couple of thugs beat the crap out of him.
Homophobia exists in Victoria, just as it does in Orlando. We aren’t better than the Americans. We aren’t inherently less violent, or less crazy.
But we don’t have many mass shootings, at least not relative to the U.S. where, just this year, there have been 136 in which at least four people were killed or wounded.
It comes down to the guns, not just the sheer number of them but the type, the licensing and the attitude toward them.
The gun used to kill 49 people and wound about 50 in Orlando on Sunday was of a military style known as the AR15. The AR-15 was also the weapon of choice in San Bernardino, California (14 killed, 22 wounded at an office party) in 2015; in Roseburg, Oregon (10 killed, nine wounded at a college) in 2015, in Aurora, Colorado (12 killed, 70 wounded in a movie theatre) in 2012 and in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (26 killed, two wounded in an elementary school) in 2012.
The thing is, the semi-automatic AR-15 is legal in Canada, too. It’s a restricted weapon, one that A) must be registered and B) may be used only for target practice on a range, not for hunting, as was legal before 1995. Significantly, in Canada, it’s supposed to only hold a five-round clip.
Last month, Bob Zimmer, a Conservative MP from northern B.C., stood in the House of Commons to table a petition calling for the return of the AR-15 to unrestricted status, “so we can once again use this rifle to lawfully participate in the Canadian cultural practices of hunting in Canada.” Given that the Liberals want to tighten gun laws, not loosen them, Zimmer is unlikely to get anywhere.
Canada’s attitude to guns, at least in less-urban areas, used to be more loosey-goosey. As a 12-year-old in Kamloops, I slapped my paper-route money onto the sales counter at Woodward’s and walked out with a Cooey single-shot .22. Every second pickup had a rifle rack. Once, as a joke, my sister leaned out the car window and yelled “Man with a gun!” when she spotted a neighbour walking along a downtown sidewalk with a deer rifle. Everybody laughed. Today it would bring out the Emergency Response Team.
Canada’s firearms rules were strengthened after a semi-automatic rifle — though not a military-style weapon — was used in Canada’s worst mass shooting, when Marc Lépine killed 14 women and wounded 14 others in Montreal’s l’École Polytechnique in 1989. The Firearms Act of 1995 brought in more rigorous rules around the training and screening of gun owners, registration and the storage of firearms and ammunition. Firearms offences in Canada have plunged dramatically since then, part of an overall drop in violent crime; gun homicides fell from 271 in 1991 to 158 in 2011 (a year in which the FBI says 8,600 Americans were murdered with firearms, the vast majority of them handguns).
Still, contrary to what urban Victorians might think, plenty of Canadians — two million of them, including a quarter million British Columbians — have permits to own guns. You need a background check to get a licence, but few applicants are rejected: only 810 were denied across Canada in 2014. Another 2,400 permits were revoked that year.
The firearms include not just unrestricted long guns such as hunting rifles and shotguns, but restricted and prohibited weapons, too.
Restricted weapons, of which 136,217 were registered in B.C. in 2014, include all handguns and any rifles (such as the AR-15) based on the M-16 military model (though you can also find a certain number of evil-looking “black rifles” that are unrestricted).
British Columbians also owned 26,337 prohibited firearms. They included automatic and sawed-off long guns, and short-barrelled, small-calibre handguns. Ownership is grandfathered. You’re only supposed to have such a firearm if you owned it (or one like it) before it was banned, and if you have held a firearms permit continuously since 1998.
Guns do, of course, end up in the wrong hands. This year saw a 17-yearold use someone else’s shotgun to kill four people in La Loche, Sask. Canada’s worst mass shooting in recent years came when a man with a history of drug- and violence-related offences used a stolen gun to kill eight relatives in Edmonton in December 2014. Last weekend, VicPD arrested a man after a report of one guy chasing another guy around tent city with a gun. Surrey has had 40 shootings so far this year.
Yet we’re still nothing like the U.S. where, by some estimates, there are now more guns than people, and where many believe in the right to bear arms the way Canadians believe in the right to health care.