O’Toole failing on firearms

Re O’Toole reverses course on firearms ban,”

Sept 6.

Those who accuse Prime Minister Trudeau of cynically using gun control as a wedge issue fail to see that the preservation of human lives, also known as public safety, ought to be a government’s ultimate priority.

Nor do they understand just how dangerous it is for Trudeau to take up this side of this issue; as a psychiatrist in practice for more than 40 years, I have learned that the minds of those who love guns are as hard to change as those who mistrust vaccines or buy into conspiracy theories.

They’re not going to be swayed by a Star headline like, “Florida gunman kills four, including a mom still holding a baby.”

Or by what happened last year in Portapique, N.S.

O’Toole is working hard to appear more avuncular than Stephen Harper, and he agrees that there is a lot of postpandemic mental illness coming down the pipe.

The only thing worse than severe mental illness is heavily-armed severe mental illness.

Nor is his promise to “review” the Liberal government’s ban good enough, when that ban has to be expanded to include rapid-fire pistols, the scourge of our inner cities.

O’Toole’s mandatory minimums will result in the incarceration, with long jail terms, of any racialized youth who gets his hands on a gun because his enemy is known to have one.

When young men and even teenagers can easily get their hands on a gun, inner-city pecking orders get disrupted and chaos ensues.

Dr. Ron Charach, Toronto