Gun bans don’t reduce gun violence when the guns being banned remain widely available to criminals
When examining the types of arguments being advanced by the pro-gun and anti-gun lobbies, it seems that the arguments divide sharply along two ways of thinking. For those who think with their hearts, the anti-gun arguments strike all the right chords. For those who think with their heads, pro-gun arguments prevail. Gun crimes are shocking and horrific, but are gun bans the answer?
With Bill C-21, Justin Trudeau is expanding his assault on legal gun ownership. Two years ago, Trudeau decided to shamelessly exploit the mass shooting in Nova Scotia to justify banning 1,500 models of “assault-style” weapons. Now a mass shooting in Texas is his pretext to implement a national freeze on handgun ownership. Incredibly, none of the measures being introduced would have prevented either mass-shooting event.
The Nova Scotia tragedy was the result of massive incompetence. The shooter appears to have gotten his rifles from the United States—illegally—and he should have been red-flagged in the system. As a 33-year-old, the shooter received a conditional discharge for repeatedly punching a 15-year old kid for standing to close to his business. Another man beat on the boy with a crowbar, and then both men stomped on him while he was on the ground. The shooter pleaded guilty to this offence and was made to pay the victim $50, complete nine months of probation, and enter an anger-management program. This left him with no criminal record. Our system of justice failed, as did government-mandated anger management.
There were reports that the shooter was illegally stockpiling weapons, but these were ignored by the RCMP. The provincial emergency alert system was never used to warn people that the shooter was masquerading as a cop, and for some reason, actual cops shot up a fire hall that was being used as an emergency refuge during the event. The two cops who shot up the fire hall defended their actions, saying they believed they had found the shooter. They were shooting at David Westlake, the emergency management coordinator for Colchester County. The police faced bureaucratic delays getting an aircraft to help track down the shooter. The RCMP helicopter was grounded for maintenance, and their fixed-wing aircraft was also unavailable. When the Mounties learned there was a military aircraft available, they called for it, but they had trouble passing the request up through official channels. Other resources that could have been mobilized simply weren’t, and so for 13 hours the shooter was able to carry on with his rampage, always a step ahead of the police. This was a failure of law enforcement.
By Rav Arora
