Matt Gurney: This isn't about gun control. Be honest, it's disdain for guns and gun owners

Alison de Groot, managing director of the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association, seen at a gun range on Aug. 24, 2019. Ed Kaiser/Postmedia

The new liberal changes will disarm non-violent and law-abiding Canadians. Surely that is the goal and in fact, it always has been.

Certainly, Canadian progressives see themselves, in contrast to conservatives, as influenced by the evidence. Better practices. Data. Last summer, a long-standing Canadian public policy debate turned head first for new information. The new information reformulated national and local debates in Canada, now we saw it again in the recent Speech of the Governor General’s Throne.

Data and police experience have long shown that Canadian criminal gangs were armed with weapons from the United States but in the summer of 2018, the Canadian Press cable service published a story that told the public that This long observed trend was no longer true.

Wrong information

Gang-related violence has increased in Canada in recent years. Much of the violence involves firearms. Where gangs get their weapons is a matter of obvious concern. If Canadian criminals obtain their weapons from Canadian legal sources, that indicates that our gun control laws are insufficient. If they get them from outside sources, mainly smuggling from the United States, which is flooded with weapons, then it is not a gun control problem, and changing our gun control laws will not help.

Likewise, the number of criminal weapons obtained in Canada had “increased dramatically”, according to a Toronto police detective, and that Canadian weapons were now roughly equal to US contraband weapons on the streets of Toronto., basically a 50–50 division.

It was a major change in the old debate, and it really suggested that Canada’s generally strict gun laws were not strict enough. It had an immediate and obvious impact on elected officials. Municipal politicians in Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere took over the statistics and demanded a national ban on firearms (firearms are strictly controlled in Canada, but can be acquired by some people who have passed several background checks and comply with numerous regulations). The PND has said it would ban short arms. Liberals have not gone so far, saying that they would give local jurisdictions the ability to impose their own prohibitions, but would not prohibit them at the national level.

Source: Matt Gurney | National Post