Opinion: Canada’s intractable gun-crime issue: Our geographic neighbour & More News Here

You might virtually forgive the Liberal authorities for utilizing the horrific killing of youngsters and lecturers in a faculty in Uvalde, Tex., because the backdrop for the disclosing of their new gun management laws. (That is, until you actually consider the timing was a spectacular coincidence, like how the federal government’s current announcement of funds to enhance abortion entry in Canada simply so occurred to come back after the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade.)

When one thing unconscionable occurs, even when it’s in one other a part of the world, there’s a very pure impulse to need to do one thing – something – in order that one thing equally horrific doesn’t occur once more, or occur right here. So the charitable interpretation of the federal government’s timing in tabling Bill C-21 is that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cupboard yielded to this very human want for motion within the wake of unfathomable tragedy. The much less beneficiant interpretation speaks to the bottom type of political depravity.

Bill C-21 actually has nothing to do with Texas, although it does characterize an enchancment on the federal government’s former plan to sort out gun violence in Canadian cities, which was to permit municipalities to ban handguns and hope that scofflaws selected to respect invisible borders. This new laws maintains accountability the place it must be – on the federal stage – by, amongst different issues, freezing the import, sale and switch of handguns, which successfully stunts the scale of the authorized market.

But the laws doesn’t change the classification of handguns (they’re nonetheless “restricted” firearms, not “prohibited” ones) and it doesn’t require present homeowners to promote their weapons again to the federal government. In impact, Mr. Trudeau is saying handguns are too harmful to proceed to promote to these with Restricted Possession and Acquisition Licenses (RPALs) – individuals who have handed background checks, offered character witnesses, accomplished exams and so forth – however not so harmful as to require the federal government to take them out of the palms of those self same license-holders.

Explainer: Trudeau is proposing a nationwide freeze on handguns in Canada. Here’s the whole lot to learn about Bill C-21 to this point

Canada has an actual gun violence downside, nevertheless it’s (largely) not the one the Liberals need to discuss

A ban on the sale of handguns? It’s about time

None of it makes a lot sense if the aim is to get harmful weapons off Canadian streets. But that’s in line with this authorities’s method to gun management. Its order-in-council in May, 2020, banned sure “military-style assault weapons,” whereas leaving functionally an identical however less-scary-looking semi-automatic weapons nonetheless authorized. And although Bill C-21 would improve penalties for weapons trafficking and different firearms offenses, the main target of the laws is decidedly on the authorized market, although the vast majority of Canadian crimes involving firearms seem to function illegally acquired or smuggled weapons; Toronto police stated that 85 per cent of the handguns they seized in 2020 could possibly be traced again to the United States.

Canada, to be clear, completely has a gun crime downside. Among high-income nations surveyed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Canada ranks third-worst, behind the U.S. and Chile respectively, for charges of firearm homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. According to Statistics Canada, charges of firearm-related violent crimes have gone up steadily since 2013, although guidelines round gun possession have tightened over the previous few years. We can infer, subsequently, that federal laws has been tackling the unsuitable situation. Canada’s already strict gun legal guidelines aren’t the issue: our border with the biggest weapons seller on the earth is.

The unlucky actuality of Canada’s gun crime downside, one which has gone largely unacknowledged (at the very least by authorities), is that we’ll endlessly be weak by advantage of our geography. Guns are being smuggled in from the U.S. by vehicles, vans, even drones – and that’s one thing that tweaking the Firearms Act is rarely going to deal with. Canada might ban all weapons tomorrow, making it in order that not a single individual on this nation might legally possess a firearm, and but we’d nonetheless be extra weak than, say, the U.Ok., as a result of the Brits don’t share a border with a rustic with extra weapons than individuals, and you may’t fly a drone from Michigan to Lancashire.

Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that it’s nonetheless price tightening restrictions on authorized gun homeowners by “freezing” handgun possession, for instance, whereas making an attempt to deal with gun smuggling on the border on the identical time. The counterargument is that the federal government has now risked dropping a probably beneficial ally in authorized gun homeowners – who need to see the unlawful gun commerce dry up most likely greater than every other bloc – whereas fomenting false hope amongst the remainder of the inhabitants that such measures will meaningfully curb firearms-involved violent crime. That hope would possibly present ephemeral consolation within the wake of the tragedies we’ve noticed within the U.S., nevertheless it gained’t resolve Canada’s most intractable gun crime situation. It’s not clear what is going to.

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