One of my first editors once told me the four most dangerous words in the English language are “Something must be done!”
Once a politician gets it in his or her head to demonstrate dramatic concern over an issue, he or she will settle on the showiest action, whether or not it will solve the problem.
In that vein, on Monday, Montreal’s city council voted unanimously to pressure Ottawa to ban all handguns, nationwide.
Never mind that the commissioner of the RCMP herself, Brenda Lucki, has said publicly she doubts a ban would have much impact on crime.
Never mind that whether or not law-abiding collectors and sport shooters are disarmed, criminals will still acquire handguns.
Handguns are the preferred tool of career criminals. It’s not as though any criminal is going to decide to become a hairstylist instead, just because blow-dryers and curling irons are legal, but pistols are not.
But now Toronto’s city council and Montreal’s – representing the two biggest Liberal cities in the country (all of Toronto’s 24 core federal seats are Liberal and 18 of Montreal’s 23) – have called for a ban. It will be difficult for the Trudeau government to resist.
Resisting will be doubly difficult for the Trudeauites, too, because no other government in the country is more easily seduced by meaningless, symbolic, something-must-be-done showiness.
Ever since the senseless shootings along Toronto’s Danforth Avenue on a warm Sunday evening last month, that killed two and injured 13, we’ve heard calls for gun bans from a host of politicians.
This is nothing new. Whenever there are mass shootings, “progressives” call for gun bans.
What makes this one different is twofold.
Mass shootings unsettle us more when the victims resemble us and are unknown to the shooter. The randomness of such attacks – especially in an otherwise peaceful and trendy neighbourhood like the Danforth – makes middle-class voters worried they, too, might be shot.
But the big difference this time has been recent claims by police across the country that most crime guns are now “domestically sourced.”
Being “domestically sourced” means the guns started out legally owned in Canada, yet somehow ended up in criminal hands. Either their legal Canadian owners sold them (illegally) to arms dealers who resold them to criminals, or the legal owners failed to secure them properly and they were stolen.
This “fact” is significant because if most crime guns started out as legally owned Canadian guns (rather than smuggled in from the States), then banning legal gun ownership in our country should cut down on the number of guns that fall into criminal hands.
Simply put, a ban on legal guns should make us all safer.
Except, of course, it wouldn’t.
First of all, the official definition of “crime gun” is overbroad. It includes guns used in murders and robberies (fair enough), but also guns spotted by officers when investigating noise complaints and ancient collectors’ items whose owners have let their licences lapse.
Even a nail gun used to threaten a burglar would be counted.
Of the guns really, truly used to commit violent crimes – fewer than 1,000 nationwide in an entire year – the country of origin can only be traced in 20 per cent of cases. And only in about half of those cases is the origin Canada.
If you press them hard enough, most police forces will still admit the majority of real crime guns they seize are smuggled in from the U.S. But even if half really were domestically sourced, the only effect of a ban would be to increase the percentage that are smuggled.
No matter how high-minded progressives such as Toronto Mayor John Tory believe they are, their ban proposal will achieve nothing except seizing property from law-abiding Canadians who are no threat to anyone.
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