Following the fatal shooting of a 12-year-old boy in the North York area of greater Toronto, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a press conference there will be new gun control legislation soon.
But Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley essentially “cracked the code” over the weekend when he wrote, “…the Trudeau government insists they are dealing with gun crime. Of course their idea of dealing with gun crimes is to seize guns, not deal with criminals, and the only guns they know how to seize are the ones owned by legal gun owners.”
Several lines later, Lilley notes Trudeau has been “spouting the standard boilerplate comments politicians make.” The prime minister reminded Canadians, “We made a commitment to ban military-style assault weapons and we have.”
But Lilley observes, “That will be cold comfort to the family of the little boy or any of the other people who have lost loved ones over the last year in Toronto or any other place where gun violence has erupted. Trudeau’s plan was never about dealing with gangsters who use guns to shoot up the streets, it was always about making the public feel they had done something about gun crime.”
Readers sided with Lilley’s perspective. It’s a signal that gun owners north of the border—where there is no Second Amendment protection of the fundamental right to keep and bear arms—are also wise to the failure of gun control laws to produce the desired results. Instead, as Lilley writes, “Taking guns away from licensed owners won’t stop gangsters though. Taking guns away from gangsters might, but that is difficult and so the government doesn’t act on that.
“Despite promising more than $250 million to deal with gun crime in the last election, that money has not been spent,” the columnist continued. “The gun ban was announced though, effectively making many of the more than two million legal and licensed gun owners into criminals with the stroke of a pen without doing a thing to stop gun crime.”
Most Canadians—at least those living in the eastern provinces—haven’t forgotten the 22-hour rampage in mid-April by killer Gabriel Wortman. He murdered 22 people including a female Mountie, Heidi Stevenson. He was subsequently killed in a confrontation with other RCMP officers. After that killing spree, Trudeau announced a ban on hundreds of firearms similar to types used by the killer and obtained illegally.
Two people are in custody for the 12-year-old’s slaying. They were identified as Jahwayne Smart, 25, and Rashawn Chambers, 24. Lilley described them as “convicted criminals prohibited from owning firearms.”
Open any newspaper in the United States, or read stories online, and chances are good if there’s a crime story involving firearms, the suspects have criminal histories that would preclude them from possessing firearms.
This brings the conversation around to the United States. Democrat Joe Biden is being hailed as the winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election—critics contend they have evidence of widespread irregularities, but they’re being rather slow in producing it—and he has already proposed sweeping gun control. His “plan to end gun violence” is what gun rights activists consider a wish list of all the gun control measures that the prohibition lobby has been demanding.
Like Trudeau, Biden appears to ready to penalize honest gun owners for crimes they didn’t commit.
Lilley’s column had drawn more than 225 comments by Monday morning. The overwhelming majority are negative to one degree or another towards Trudeau and gun control.
Canada already institutes many of the gun control schemes that anti-gunners in the U.S. advocate. Considering what happened to a 12-year-old last week, the formula hasn’t worked any better north of the Great Lakes as it has south of the lakes.
