Ban handguns under Bill C-71? An idea full of holes.

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Aug 2018

RE: It’s time for Canada to consider a handgun ban.

The Hamilton Spectator tried to make a reasonable sounding appeal for the banning of handguns.

The Spectator’s argument to consider a ban on handguns is shot full of holes.

Let’s consider the Spectator’s facts.  The shooting in Greektown was committed by Faisal Hussain, who was not the gun’s owner.  He took it from his brother, Fahad, who is comatose from a drug overdose and who is not a lawful owner himself.  The gun in question is illegal in Canada because it is capable of fully automatic fire, and was reportedly stolen in Saskatoon after being illegally imported from the United States.

Since the illegal owning of illegal handguns in Canada is already banned, it is not clear that the banning of legal handguns legally owned by law-abiding Canadians would have stopped the Greektown shooting.  The proposed solution doesn't solve the very problem it is offered to solve.

The banning of handguns would create an altogether new mass of gun-criminals in Canada: the formerly law-abiding gun owners who were made felons by the new law, until such time as they turned them in.  That leaves open the question of who, exactly, is going to collect these hundreds of thousands of guns, and how will the blameless owners be compensated for the dispossession of their formerly legal property?

Then there is the problem of equal treatment under the law, as guaranteed under the Charter  If farmers, hunters, trappers, and Aboriginals have legitimate reasons for owning long-guns, why can’t target shooters or collectors own them – are their reasons not “legitimate” and aren’t they equal under the law?  Is gun ownership an Aboriginal right?

Why should the police be armed under the new legal regime?  They aren’t in the UK.  The murder rate in London now exceeds that of New York City, but it is accomplished with knives and motor vehicles instead of guns.  Gun bans don’t solve the underlying social issues that give rise to violence.

Here’s my modest proposal: deport all males between the ages of 15 and 50 of Jamaican or Middle-Eastern descent.  Among them and in the drug trade is where the illegal and violent misuse of guns lies.  But so radical a solution would never be adopted, so instead the comfortably ignorant wish to discharge their pain on the law-abiding and the invisible.

-30-