Gun Rights

The rising tide of violent crime can’t be ignored. It’s time to ban handguns

There is not so much a violent crime wave sweeping Canada as a tide of crime that has been rising for years, and is now reaching deeply concerning levels.

The data released last month by Statistics Canada are shocking: the number of police-reported violent crimes nationwide shot up to 531,243 in 2022, an increase of almost two-fifths from 2015, all of it on the Liberals’ watch. Adjusted for population growth, the picture is nearly as bad: there were 1,365 violent crimes per 100,000 Canadians in 2022, a 27-per-cent increase since 2015, and the worst year since 2006.

A third of guns used in Canadian crimes and then traced by authorities were legally imported from the US. That’s three times the global average.

Some 300 miles north of Canada’s border with Montana, the prairies end, the roads narrow and the rural towns give way to the vast, unbroken forests of northern Saskatchewan, where on clear nights the aurora borealis dance above pristine lakes.

This is the home of Canada’s highest rate of gun crimes.

Drive-by shootings, the latest just a few months ago, have erupted in the quiet lanes of La Ronge, which serves as an entry point to the northern expanse. In May 2022, a 32-year-old man was shot dead at a cottage. A month later, on a sunny Sunday morning, La Ronge went into lockdown as an emergency alert warned of two suspects, armed with handguns, on the loose. In a community of some 7,000 people, police in recent months have seized more than 50 rifles and handguns. The firearms now line one wall of a storage room. A dozen more are stashed, barrels down, in a blue bucket.

Must be an election looming.

Popular devices known as “switches” are turning ordinary pistols into fully automatic weapons, making them deadlier and a growing threat to bystanders.

Caison Robinson, 14, had just met up with a younger neighbor on their quiet street after finishing his chores when a gunman in a white car rolled up and fired a torrent of bullets in an instant.

“Mom, I’ve been shot!” he recalled crying, as his mother bolted barefoot out of their house in northwest Las Vegas. “I didn’t think I was going to make it, for how much blood was under me,” Caison said.

The Las Vegas police say the shooting in May was carried out with a pistol rigged with a small and illegal device known as a switch. Switches can transform semiautomatic handguns, which typically require a trigger pull for each shot, into fully automatic machine guns that fire dozens of bullets with one tug.

The US Supreme Court has allowed restrictions against untraceable “ghost guns” to stand while an appeal by the White House is pending.

In July, a Texas court blocked a 2022 rule requiring self-assembled “ghost gun” kits to have serial numbers – legally making them a firearm.

Gun rights groups and gun owners had sued to stop the new rule.

The decision comes as the White House faces pressure to take more action on gun violence.

On a crisp Sunday afternoon in Royse City, Texas, 32-year-old Cesar Hurtado unzipped a hardshell case to reveal a custom-built AR-15-style rifle in his living room. Emblazoned on the side of the gun is the tagline “no war, no gods, no masters”.

Hurtado’s interest in firearms started with hunting, but after the 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso that targeted Latinos, Hurtado felt he had to embrace firearms for his own protection. “For white gun owners, they feel they have a right to a gun,” Hurtado said, “but for Latino gun owners, it’s a matter of survival and safety.”

Headlines over “gun deaths” will always draw eyes. Some people will immediately click the link, then share it all over social media, just so they can say, “See! I told you guns are bad!”

There are usually problems with this, though.

For example, these reports rarely provide any context and they also tend to involve a fair bit of sensationalism in presenting all firearm-related fatalities as the same.

A murder charge that was laid against a Milton man accused of killing an armed intruder earlier this year has been dropped.

The Crown withdrew the second-degree murder charge laid against Ali Mian Monday, saying there is no reasonable prospect of a conviction.

Sasha Wiesen sleeps with a .40-caliber handgun in a safe by his bed. The commercial real-estate broker from Florida recently preordered a new type of firearm he hopes will make the safe unnecessary.

The new weapon is the Colorado startup Biofire’s 9mm Smart Gun, which can only be fired if it recognizes an authorized user with a fingerprint reader on the grip or a facial recognition camera on the back.

In May 2020, the federal government announced a ban on 1,500 types of what it called “assault-style” firearms. As part of this ban, it has promised to provide “fair compensation” to gun owners whose firearms it confiscates.

The ban’s aim is to keep Canadians safe. “Enough is enough,” said then-minister of public safety Bill Blair. “Banning these firearms will save Canadian lives.” But will this scheme actually make Canadians safer? And what will it cost? The government of New Zealand recently completed its own gun ban and buyback. It provides a good case study of the effects such a program can have.