it’s time to rethink our broken gun policies

If we’re going to have an honest debate about guns in this country, the first thing we have to admit to ourselves is that our present gun control regime isn’t really about public safety. And it’s certainly not about saving lives.
Anti-gun activists tend to quote the number of gun-related deaths in Canada – an average of 844 per year. But what they never tell you is that of those 844, 656 are suicides. And that the number of car-related fatalities is more than four times the total rate of gun-deaths. Likewise, the number of stabbing fatalities is well above the number of gun-related homicides.
But as you and I both know, we’re not likely to see bans on knives or cars. Because we, the urban educated elites like cars; and we don’t like guns; and because fatalities have never really driven our prohibition policies.
The truth is that our current prohibition policies aren’t about saving lives; rather they’re about the urban/rural divide. They’re about urban Canadians, who, for the most part, don’t hunt, don’t fish, and wouldn’t know a moose from an antelope; don’t like the idea of “rural people” having guns.
Urban Canada’s penchant for foolish obsession has led us into some absurd regulatory debacles in the past, but there is none so ridiculous as the Liberals’ ill-conceived Long Gun Registry – the ultimate “fuck you” to rural gun owners.
This monumental waste of money – originally estimated to cost the taxpayer $2 million, ballooned to a cost of more than $1 billion before taxpayers even knew anything was wrong.
When the Conservatives came to power, one of their first actions was a bill for the registry’s closure; the opposition stalled the closure using the public’s prejudices against firearms to score rhetorical points.
And while the opposition squabbled and pandered throughout, the program’s costs have continued to escalate. According to reports by the CBC, the program’s cost may now be as high as $2 billion – 2,000 times the original estimates for a program that the Auditor General now says provides no discernable benefit to public security. The gun registry and similar debacles are what happen when our gun policy is driven by a combination of pique and a prejudice against gun holders.
When a new government is formed in October, Canadians will have a real opportunity to reconsider the gun registry’s future. We would do well to make some real changes to gun policy in this country by reducing restrictions and costs on legitimate, responsible gun owners, and instead focus on tougher penalties for gun-crimes and increased policing to prevent the importation of illegal weapons.
To be clear: criticism of Canada’s gun laws is not an open demand that the NRA move north; it is not a demand for a culture of mutual threat; it is not about irrational love of firearms.
Cutting the fat out of Canada’s gun policy is about trying to make our country safer – about recognizing that our present system is more placebo than cure.