Editorial
Gun violence is a scourge upon the land, especially for our southern neighbours, as evidenced by the bi-weekly reports of school shootings and other massacres that take place with alarming frequency in the US, from coast-to-coast.
The American love affair with the gun, largely borne out of a post-civil war concern about declining marksmanship that led to the creation of the National Rifle Association (NRA), has made it nearly impossible to deal with the issue. Gun regulation is a near-complete political anathema at the polls in the US, thanks to generations of lobbying efforts courtesy of the well-funded NRA.
An American distrust of government plays a significant role in both that country’s gun culture, not to mention many of the more bizarre political events and actors seen in recent years. The revolutionary evolution of the US, its baptism of fire through a disastrous civil war that has left many wounds yet unhealed and the prison culture that has the US standing head and shoulders above even the most autocratic of dictatorships (China being the notable exception) in the number of citizens it has incarcerated, has resulted in a country where guns outnumber people by a very significant amount (more than 120 per capita). When it comes to an armed populace, nobody does it better.
The NRA will be among the first to say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and this is true. England, with its much stricter gun controls, has a serious knife problem. Knives don’t kill people either, but people are much better at killing other people when they have one in their hand and are in the ‘right’ frame of mind.
Despite its purported innocence in the carnage being inflicted on US children practically every day, gun control is a very effective dog whistle issue utilized by both right- and left-leaning politicians, both in the US and in this country as well.
Clearly (one would think), letting children carry assault rifles down the street with impunity bent on enforcing “peace,” as they see it, is a bad idea (except for Republicans in Missouri as evidenced by recent laws passed that allow such). Allowing the clinically insane, known domestic abusers, convicted felons and a host of other poorly socialized folks to go out and buy and carry guns willy-nilly would seem to fall into the decidedly bad idea category.
Given the ability of modern weapons to inflict mass casualties that lie far outside the mindset of 18th century nation-builders, it would seem to call for some forms of regulation placing limits on such weapons as modern assault rifles—end stop.
But. Easier said than done.
But then, for some reason that only seems to make sense when viewed through the lens of the aforementioned dog whistle politics, the federal government decided to try and tackle the assault rifle issue by tacking a compendious list of offending weapons onto another gun bill. That bill, another somewhat suspect piece of legislation, was aimed at banning handguns. Chaos ensued and the feds had to pull in their horns.
But the handgun bill itself is fundamentally flawed. Not so much for the guns don’t kill people argument, but because the real issue, demonstratable in the government’s own statistics, is that handgun violence is being enabled by the flow of illegal handguns arriving courtesy of our gun-loving neighbours. The handgun bill really does little to address that issue and instead puts ordinary hobbyists and collectors in the legislative bullseye.
This is, quite simply, lazy governing. The issue of gun violence plaguing our large urban communities (and increasingly small rural ones like Manitoulin) is not the legal handgun owner, hobbyist or collector who is already weighed and measured by strict regulation, but the criminals who prey upon society and use the handgun as their tool of choice.
Gun violence needs to be addressed, but targeting farmers, hobbyists and other collectors will not fit the bill. Federal politicians need to step away from the easy path of dog whistle politics, roll up their sleeves to craft sensible regulations that will actually tackle the root causes behind the issue.
