Not much we can do to prevent tragedies like Moncton
On April 9, Justin Bourque posted a photo on his Facebook page showing Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow overlaid with this text: “We need your guns, they said. So I shot them.”
There are many similar posts on his Facebook page, complaining that gun control laws are an unacceptable intrusion on personal liberty that do nothing to make our communities safer.
On Thursday, while Moncton Mounties were hunting for Bourque and mourning the shooting deaths of three of their comrades, the National Firearms Association issued a statement saying the event showed “none of Canada’s firearms control efforts over the past 50 years have had any effect on preventing violence, or otherwise stopping bad people from carrying out their evil deeds.”
“It is clear that Canada’s excessive firearms control system has failed again. The excessive rules in place do not in any way increase public safety, but merely contribute to an expensive and unnecessary regime which harms only those of lawful intent.”
Bourque likely agrees. Adam Lanza, who shot 20 children and six teachers at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, was a supporter of the National Rifle Association.
The Canadian gun association may have been inspired to send out its Thursday news release by the NRA’s vigorous and successful anti-gun-control messaging after the Newtown massacre, although it would have been wiser to wait at least until the crime scene was cleaned up, as the NRA did after Newtown.
A week after Newtown, Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the NRA, gave a defiant speech in Washington in which he blamed gun control for making mass shootings more likely. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said.
I think the NRA and the NFA are dead wrong about this. Stricter gun control prevents mass shootings. Japan, where it is next to impossible to get a gun, has not had a mass shooting since 1938.
In the United States, on the other hand, mass shootings occur about once every two weeks, according to a recent USA Today analysis. Just last month in Santa Barbara, a young man angry at being rejected by women killed six and wounded 13. And on Thursday afternoon, the day after the Moncton shooting, a would-be mass shooter was interrupted in an attack on a Seattle University after he killed one and wounded two.
The NRA is the most effective lobbying organization in the United States, funded in large part by gun manufacturers, whose markets it protects by aggressively countering gun-control legislation. The NRA wants to make it easier for people to get guns, opposing background checks, for instance, although polls show 90 per cent of Americans support them. It recently chided a staff member who had spoken against gun advocates in Texas who carry assault rifles into fast-food restaurants to protest against gun restrictions.
In Canada, the NFA doesn’t push for the right for gun lovers to walk into Tim Hortons with AR-15s, but it does want to get rid of licensing, the system that allows police to take guns away from people who have been convicted of a criminal offence.
That is not going to happen. The Conservatives, having delivered gun advocates a historic victory by getting rid of the gun registry, aren’t going to risk alienating other voters by getting rid of an important public safety measure like licensing.
But the Tories, who need the votes of highly motivated gun enthusiasts, are careful to stay on the good side of the NFA. After police seized guns from flooded homes in High River, Alta., the prime minister’s office rebuked the Mounties.
And in February, when the RCMP moved to ban Swiss Arms semi-automatic rifles that can easily be converted to fire on auto, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney denounced the “unelected bureaucrats” who had made the decision, and announced a two-year amnesty for Canadians who own the guns.
I think we would be better off banning Swiss Arms rifles, and that we were better off with a gun registry, but gun control advocates exaggerate the effectiveness of such measures. Unlike Japan, Canada has a long border with the United States, where you can buy assault rifles, handguns and sniper rifles without inconvenient paperwork. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t ban guns.
And while I disagree with the NFA, it represents the sincere views of law-abiding gun owners across the country, a grassroots political force that worked hard for years to get rid of the gun registry. If a future government brings it back, gun advocates will get rid of it again.
I think a point-of-sale registry — which would give police a valuable investigative tool — might be politically sustainable, but there is no point pretending there’s much we can do to prevent the kind of tragedy that happened in Moncton this week.
We can only mourn the dead and hope for the best.