In an essay published on CNN (read it here), an American college professor in Toronto writes:
“You can’t read these news stories [about mass shootings] and believe that US gun laws are working.” Uh, duh. You don’t need a Ph.D. to see that. Canada isn’t violence-free, but its homicide rate is 1/6th of ours. So maybe there’s a better way?
He thinks buying guns in America “is too easy.” Canada has a federal licensing system that makes buying a gun “like getting a driver’s license,: he says, although it’s way more than that: It involves “a variety of background checks, a minimum 28-day waiting period for a first-time firearms license, a requirement to take a safety training course, and “You have to provide personal references who can vouch for your character.”
It does seem to do a better job of keeping guns away from “high-risk people,” and he believes that’s a major reason why Canada has far fewer high-profile shooting incidents than we do. (It’s also a smaller, less populous country.)
But it probably can’t be done here, for two reasons: Republicans in Congress, and Republican Supreme Court justices.
Some writers dispute that Canada’s gun control laws are effective (here), arguing they do nothing to stop smuggling guns from the U.S. or illegal guns (here), while others complain that Canada is now emulating the U.S. by loosening restrictions (here), although Canada did ban assault weapons in 2020 after a recent mass shooting there (read about it here).
One essayist argued (here), “Studies show that the more guns in a country per capita, the higher the number of mass shootings that incur. Canada has about ten million firearms owned by civilians, which amounts to 31 guns per 100 people, whereas in the US, there are over 310 million firearms. That translates into almost one gun for every person, thirty times the number in Canada. US gun ownership is the highest in the world,” which probably helps explain why our gun violence is so severe.
But if that’s so, what hope is there? You can’t round up that many guns, or even significantly dent their numbers, with that many already in circulation. It really looks like the horse is already out of the barn. It would be nice if Republicans took a more responsible approach to America’s gun violence problem, but I’m not optimistic that would help much — although anything is better than nothing.
I do support stricter regulation of guns. I don’t see any reason for civilians to possess weapons designed for war. I don’t understand why anyone would oppose universal background checks. As for people who openly carry like those in the video below, I automatically assume they’re both stupid and dangerous.
Related: On Friday, April 23, 2021, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed a bill passed by the legislature to lower the concealed-carry age to 18. Read story here.