Assault weapons aren’t a danger in Canada

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Dec 22

RE: Make assault weapons ban permanent.  Op-ed by Najma Ahmed, John Kortbeek, and Murray Trusler.  Ahmed is a trauma surgeon and professor of surgery at the University of Toronto; Kortbeek is a professor in the departments of surgery and of critical care at the University of Calgary; Trusler is a retire chief of staff, Weeneebayko Health Authority, James Bay, ON.  All are members of Canadian doctors for protection from guns.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 23 Dec 22.

Once again, we see medical doctors asserting and abusing their alleged expertise to make political demands on something they know nothing about.  The trio who wrote the article at reference demand that “assault weapons” be banned permanently.  Here are some facts.

Assault rifles, if that is what they mean by assault ‘weapons’, were banned in Canada in 1977.  The term assault weapon has no agreed upon definition, either in law or in the firearms debate.  The reason Bill C-21 was amended with over 300 pages of firearms by name shows that legal definition of ‘assault like weapons’ escapes the expertise of the government of Canada.

In 2020, according to Statistics Canada, there were a total of 743 homicides in Canada from all causes, and this figure includes the 22 killings in Nova Scotia by Gabriel Wortman.  (Of 743, 201 were of aboriginals.)  Of the 743, 270 were caused by shooting with a firearm; and of these 270, 30 percent, or 81 in total, were caused by rifle or shotgun.  So far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a single homicide in Canada caused with an AR-15 in 25 years.

Shootings in Canada are not a big business for trauma surgeons, for the occasions of mass shootings have decades of interval between them; and at 81 per year across Canada, rifles and shotguns seem to pose little threat of homicide to the public at large.  Passing legislation and spending billions of dollars to seize the safely used and rigorously controlled private property of law-abiding Canadians is irrational, unsupportable by the data, and based on uninformed scaremongering.

Given that aboriginals have seven times the rate of homicide as the public at large, perhaps a useful experiment in the effect of gun control would be to dispossess the aboriginals of their rifles and shotguns, and watch for a decline in the rate of homicide in that community.  I doubt such a proposal would fly, but dispossession can be achieved under color of seizing everyone’s guns.

Billions of dollars and a lot of political capital will be and is being spent in chasing a fool’s errand.  Homicide rates won’t go down, only the proportions of means will change.

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