The anti-gun propaganda is relentless

Vincent J. Curtis

30 May 22

RE: Handgun use in violent crime growing, StatsCan says. A Canadian Press story by Hina Alam published in the Hamilton Spectator 30 May 22

It isn’t until paragraph 15 of a 21 paragraph story that you get actual figures.  In 2020, there were a grand total of 743 homicide victims in Canada, of which 277 were killed by handgun.  StatsCan relies on police reporting when it says that 8,344 were victims of crimes “involving guns.”  But since police can’t distinguish between pellet guns and the real things, and probably neither can most victims, we don’t really know the number of times real guns were employed.

Nevertheless, the Liberal government wants to seize 250,000 so-called “assault rifles.”  This isn’t in response to Uvalde and Buffalo because this is the same bill that was introduced after 1 May 2020.  An assault rifle is not anything like a handgun, and it appears that “assault rifles” were only used twice in Canadian criminal history for mass shootings, Ecole Polytechnique in 1989, and Nova Scotia in 2020.  In both cases an AR-15 was not used, and the rifle that was used was illegally possessed.  There are approximately 1,000,000 handguns legally owned in Canada, and in response to a rise in handgun crimes, the government is moving to ban “assault rifles” that are used for sporting purposes.  Today, Prime Minister Trudeau announced future ban on handgun sales, importation, and transfers.  The political con should be obvious: the Liberals are not letting a crisis go to waste.

Notable in 2020 was the massacre in Nova Scotia of 22 people, and when you’re dealing with small numbers, one crime can bump the statistics up by lots of percentage points.  What’s being lost is 277 out of a population of 35 million is a miniscule fraction.  277 is the number of people killed in Chicago in a month.  The slaughter of 18 in Uvalde, Texas, is a weekend tally in Chicago.  Every weekend.  Texas has had five mass shooting since 2014.  The point is that Canada is not the United States, and Canada does not need to seize people’s guns and property to take other people’s pain away.  Not in this country.  Pain should not beget pain.  Nor should we let political opportunists get away with saying “give me more power, and I will take your pain away.”

Seizing the guns of the law abiding won’t make this country any safer.  The people saying they can make you feel safer all have armed protection details.

-30-

P.S.  CBC News reported today about feral hogs invading Alberta towns.  Hogs have been a problem in the U.S. for decades, and the solution has been to hunt them at night with AR-15s with night vision equipment.  Why the AR-15?  Low recoil means fast follow-up shots, accuracy out to 300 meters, and a standard magazine capacity of 30 rounds.  Rural, and even urba, Alberta is going to need AR-15s for varmint control.