Fewer Guns in Canada Keeps Canada Better

March for Our Lives was a student-led demonstration in support of legislation to prevent gun violence in the “United” States. These marches have no effect on policy; new strategies are needed in order for anything to happen at the federal level. Canadians can Keep Canada Better Again by allowing fewer guns in Canada. Photo by Gregory Varnum.

 

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Most Canadians want their homeland to avoid mirroring the numerous failed practices and policies of their southern neighbor that have led to an American dystopia. Keep Canada Better Again is a series of posts written by a U.S. citizen living in Canada.

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[The] rifle in my hands shed its romanticized appeal until it resembled exactly what it was — a tool — not a belief system, not an identity, not something to show off. And it was also a tool I simply hadn’t any use for at this time in my life.”

— the words of Nicholas Mizera, a former U.S. gun owner, after moving to Canada

 

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Everyone knows the “United” States of America has a gun problem… everyone except most of the citizens who support the 28 billion dollar gun industry. Ask a random Canadian about guns down there and most likely you’ll hear a sense of disbelief that so many of their southern neighbors somehow think more guns in circulation will somehow make life better. Recently an American president made a comment about shithole countries. When deciding whether a country is a shithole, most people consider how many grievances in the nation are “resolved” with guns. More and more, the States seems like a shithole in this respect.

 

Guns have been an American problem since the 19th century, when this cartoon was penned.

 

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Disclaimers: Obviously not all gun owners can be lumped together, e.g., a gun serves an actual purpose if you hunt your own food. If you want to read pro-gun websites, you have thousands to choose from; this is not one of them. If you actually care about all this, a better understanding of the historical basis for why the USA is flooded with guns can be gained by reading The Second Amendment: A Biography, by Michael Waldman.

“Trigger warning”: Below we will not be referring to guns as “firearms”, which is the ornamental term deemed politically correct by gun activists.

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Fun Gun Facts, USA edition:

• In the past half-century [1968–2015], more American civilians died by gun (1.49M) than the number of Americans killed in combat (1.17M) during wars: every war they’ve ever fought in combined

 

• 3% of U.S. adults* own half of the civilian guns 

* This tiny fraction of the population — known colloquially as “gun nuts” — feel entitled to hold the rest of the nation hostage with their arsenals. Not all gun nuts are equal, but we can safely agree that a good example of a gun nut is Stephen Craig Paddock, who owned 50 guns and brought half of them to shoot 58 people dead and wound 422 more in Las Vegas.

 

• Only a couple decades ago, most gun owners in the States purchased them for “recreation”; today, FEAR is a primary driver

 

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Let’s start with death, since statistically that’s usually the purpose of gun ownership in 21st century America. Unless one is exceptionally creative, talented, or lucky with other options, pulling a trigger is the easiest and quickest method of “neutralizing” a neighbor, spouse, coworker / boss, elementary school child, or bystander. It’s no surprise, then, that “heightened perceptions of danger” (a politically correct term for fear) have perpetuated a feedback loop resulting in a sea of guns drowning a nation. Recent data shows how the majority of U.S. gun owners now buy them with “protection against people” [graph above] foremost on their minds.

You don’t need to be a stable genius to figure out what happens when more guns enter circulation. The more automobiles on the road, the more likely it is that people will be maimed or killed by an automobile. [Note to the uninitiated: this is where gun nuts will enter the conversation and snidely propose that automobiles be banned because they might be used to kill people.] The thing is, automobiles were invented to get people from point A to point B, so their correlation with death is wholly unintentional. Guns were invented to maim / kill people (with the added benefit of also improving the odds of bagging supper on a hunt), so it’s rarely a surprise when we hear of guns intentionally involved in fatal or non-lethal shootings. 

 

The price of “freedom” in the States.

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Despite feelings, guns ≠ safety in the U.S.

The multi-billion dollar gun industry is quick to capitalize on an odd story like the 61-yr-old disabled man who “fended off” robbers with his AR-15 (getting himself seriously injured in the process), but regardless of occasional “happy endings” for some gun lovers, epidemiological research suggests that guns in the home make Americans less safe. The gun industry has now successfully prevented further federal research so that Americans never have to read findings like this:

Despite the widely held belief that guns are effective for protection, our results suggest that they actually pose a substantial threat to members of the household”.

While nearly 70% of women cite “protection” as a primary reason for gun ownership, data shows that guns in the home are more likely to result in their death than protect them. Not to mention, victims of domestic violence are 5x more likely to be murdered if their abuser has access to a gun.

 

 

Handguns are the drug of choice for fearful folk these days, with ownership helped along by the propaganda and legislative achievements of extremely powerful special interest gun groups. As devastating as AR-15s are as a preferred weapon for mass shootings, most gun murders in the USA involve handguns, which makes it ironic that [1] handguns are flooding the USA for “protection against people” and [2] public sentiment against banning handguns has also increased. In Canada, a bit more than half (55%) of gun-related murders in 2017 were committed using handguns, with rifles or shotguns accounting for 23%.

 

So this week’s mass shooting was pretty awful, right? Surely it will break the never-ending cycle? Nope.

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Gun fetishes and good intentions

If you doubt that guns are a fetish for many of their owners, take a gander at how they are sexualized. Many gun fetishists, aka hoplophiliacs, will inform you of their status as red-blooded, law-abiding, and responsible good samaritans. The extent to which they feel it necessary to paint such a picture for you is a bit creepy. While sometimes gun lust is so absurd as to be humorous, headlines in the States reveal the nation’s truly dark, dystopian gun culture. For reference see “Missouri lawmaker introduces bill that would REQUIRE state residents to own AR-15 semi-automatic rifles“, and then check out the entitlement in “Trump-Supporting Gun Activist ARRESTED For Flashing Gun At Police Officer.” Fewer guns in Canada means that stupid people are not as emboldened (and are less lethal).

Regardless of stated good intentions, every gun owner in the States who doesn’t secure his guns at all times is by default even more implicated in the U.S. gun problem by providing the opportunity for theft (300,000–600,000 guns are stolen from private owners each year in the USA). Let’s also point out that the phrase “law-abiding gun owner” means very little. Many, for one reason or another, suddenly became the opposite of law-abiding with just the pull of a trigger. What could be easier when you’re having a crisis? A perfect example of a formerly law-abiding gun owner is Stephen Paddock.

 

Washington DC, Saturday March 24, 2018.
It’s past time for the USA to realize that things have changed since 1791.
Photo by Stephen Melkisethian.

When will U.S. gun culture change?

Barring some kind of spectacular event, gun culture in the States probably won’t budge in the next decade or two. Despite some handwringing after massive death tolls, most in the States just accept gun violence as an inevitable downside to the American Dream. Gun activists make damn sure that no beneficial laws are passed. Perhaps the pivot point will be when a group of armed U.S. citizens launch an assault on another group, or upon the general population. The most likely scenario — given who holds the largest arsenals — is a white nationalist group carrying out a terrorist attack.

Especially if Donald Trump loses the 2020 election, it doesn’t take much imagination for his foot soldiers to eclipse their usual individual acts of terrorism by instead collaboratively rampaging simultaneously in synagogues or mosques (à la Christchurch), or collectively opening fire within barrios. “Lone wolf” attackers are written off as mentally ill (while their often white nationalist motivations are dismissed by the GOP), but if a group of these AR-15 white domestic terrorists finally pull off a mass shooting with a death toll in the triple digits, some kind of change in the USA might actually occur. Then again, the watershed moment may look different than we can currently imagine. 

Pimps for the multi-billion dollar gun industry want you to know that more guns will make you safe. If you and everyone else carries two “firearms”, nobody will dare try to shoot you, right? Because people are so predictable, rational, and not driven by emotions…

Response from the gun cult

A prevailing attitude among gun rights activists in the States — if confronted with the reality of gun violence — is to try completely removing guns from the equation and transfer all liability for gun deaths onto whatever their hive mind pet peeve of the month happens to be: social media, lack of parental discipline, not repeating the pledge of allegiance to the flag in school, unisex toilets, liberal media bias, etc. etc.  You must learn that gun violence has nothing to do with guns. After all, the damage done by a rocket launcher has nothing to do with the capacity of a rocket launcher to do damage: it’s all about using your rocket launcher responsibly. Gun fetishists in the U.S. will go to extreme lengths to support their hobby, telling you that public schools need armed guards — because nothing says “freedom” like armed guards to remind you of how free you are…

One point normal Canadians often miss about 2nd Amendment fetishists is the widespread and sincere belief among these gun owners that their arsenals of firepower are insurance against a tyrant annexing “their” nation and enslaving them. This is obviously a laughable rationale, and one made only more absurd when considering that 1 of the 2 major political parties in the country is rapidly moving towards authoritarianism, which goes completely unnoticed by the sods who spent their money on arsenals. Canadians know that fewer guns in Canada helps to Keep Canada Better. In part, this is because most don’t have a victimhood mentality and childish notions about the Canadian government becoming tyrannical.

 

The Canadian C7A2 Rifle. When a soldier has a bad day, he doesn’t decide to go out and murder Canadians. Do you want similar guns in the hands of your agitated neighbor, coworker, or ex when they have a really bad day and want to share their discontent with others?

Okay, so what does all this have to do with Canada?

The mentality of those who carry heat in the States has diffused into Canadian gun enthusiast circles via the world wide web, so you can expect to read and hear the same propaganda from gun activists on both sides of the border. (Come to think of it, many of the worst U.S. attitudes make their way up to Canada via the Internet.) We won’t name names here, but it’s easy to find Canadian websites dissing anyone who doesn’t think AR-15s are god’s gift to humanity. Most of these sites are devoid of logic and replete with victimhood: apparently Canadian “police-vetted hunters and farmers” will be unhappy in life and unable to hunt if they don’t have access to AR-15s. The whole scam they are trying to pull here is juvenile and snowflakey — but it works in the U.S. to energize men who think they need AR-15s to be fulfilled in life.

There are some positive signs that Canada has no intention of moving towards the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution — an amendment that amounts to insanity in the 21st century. Bill C-71 passed, so the vast, overwhelming majority of Canadians (i.e., those without an AR-15 fetish) can rest even easier than before. Despite many concessions to the gun lobby in Bill C-71, far-right nationalist / anti-immigration groups (who just happen to also be extremely paranoid, persecution complex gun activists) want you to believe this is just the first step in banning Canadians from owning guns. Should we be sad that far-right nationalist / anti-immigration groups are probably now a bit less able to gun down Canadians they don’t like?

We’ll end this post by quoting Public Safety Canada’s press release about Bill C-71, An Act to Amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearms:

The new legislation provides practical, targeted and measured steps to help keep Canadians safe:

• Help ensure people with a history of violence are not granted a license to own firearms through expanded background checks that consider the applicant’s lifetime history, not just the preceding five years;
• Help keep firearms out of the wrong hands by requiring sellers to verify the validity of a firearms licence before selling a non-restricted firearm;
• Help police tracing guns used in crimes by requiring businesses to keep point-of-sale records for non-restricted firearms;
• Require authorization to transport restricted and prohibited firearms to locations other than the range (e.g. gunsmith, gun show, etc.) through strengthened transportation requirements; and,
• Safeguard the impartial classification of firearms by putting the responsibility in the hands of technical experts, who make these determinations based on the Criminal Code.

Fewer Guns in Canada: a reality in 2020

Update — May 1, 2020 : Finally, some more progress. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government banned 1,500 makes and models of “military-style” / “assault-style” weapons, including the popular AR-15 and its variants. As some have stated, Trudeau’s move to ban military-grade assault weapons falls short of what could be done to prevent Murican-style murder in Canada — but by Murican standards, this is HUGE.

A simple point by Trudeau is too logical for many people to decipher:

These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. There is no use and no place for such weapons in Canada.”

Violent crimes involving firearms have devastating impacts on families and communities across the country. But enough is enough. Military-grade assault weapons can no longer be bought, sold, transported, imported, or used in Canada. pic.twitter.com/ItNHiKtvqJ

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) May 2, 2020

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