Canadian Tom Fletcher writes a column for the Richmond Review about the Canadian Liberal Party’s proposal of a nationwide handgun ban. Fletcher is opposed to the ban, not because he doesn’t think it will prevent crime, but because he says it doesn’t focus on where the guns are actually coming from: The United States.
The scope of the real gun problem in urban Canada makes it even more of an insult that Paul Martin would use it for a cheap political stunt. Handguns have been “banned†from just about everyone in Canada since 1934. Everyone but the Liberals seems to know where they’re coming from.
Vancouver police say 90 per cent of the guns they seize can be traced back to Washington State. Strangely, Ontario residents are led to believe that large numbers of handguns are not smuggled, but stolen from Canadians and used in crime.
I’m willing to bet the guy who blew away Bindy Johal on a dance floor in a Vancouver nightclub in 1999 wasn’t using a registered handgun, and that he didn’t steal it in B.C. either. These guys make their living importing and selling cocaine, so importing guns isn’t a big trick for them.
Then there was the fellow from Surrey who was dropped off on the U.S. side of the border on the evening of Nov. 29, 2003. U.S. border guards at Lynden noticed the vehicle cruising for a drop-off spot, and watched on night-vision equipment as he tried to carry a sack across to Aldergrove on foot. Inside the sack were 21 semi-automatic handguns, complete with clips.
Our gun problems don’t just hurt our country (although they do, a lot). The United States is the largest exporters of firearms and weapons in the world, many times over (and those figures are probably only legal weapons– illegally, we’re leaking weapons from all sides). All those guns terrorizing Canadian citizens? It’s likely they originally were sold legally in the United States. All the small arms problems they’re having in South America and Africa? Guess where the weapons came from.
Criminals don’t make weapons. They don’t go into mines, dig out the minerals, melt and mold the gunbarrels, and construct the trigger mechanisms. They buy their weapons, and they buy them from the gun industry, located right here in the good ol’ US of A. The gun industry loves the sound of gunshots, because every time they hear a gun fired, it’s another dollar for them. But the same gunshots that are making them money are also killing children and creating victims all over the world.
