Ottawa councillor Mathieu Fleury, a handgun ban supporter, just asked 'Who carries a gun?' Uh, that’d be criminals

Some days reading the news you struggle to remind yourself that people aren’t being daft on purpose and, even if they are, it’s not to annoy you personally. For instance calls for a handgun ban because some reckless thug shot a law-abiding citizen in Ottawa.

It would not be correct to label these calls “symbolic” because cities lack jurisdiction over guns. If a municipal problem is legislatively the responsibility of a senior level of government, it makes sense to ask it to act. But not this way.

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The reason they’re symbolic, and silly, isn’t just that murder is already illegal. It’s that murders like Ottawa’s on Friday are committed by people using weapons it’s already illegal for them to carry or, usually, own. What’s the point of banning illegality?

What’s the point of banning illegality?

Ignoring this question leads to infuriatingly feeble proposals. The Ottawa Citizen says “Toronto city council this month is scheduled to debate a motion asking for the federal and provincial governments to ban the sale of handguns, assault rifles, semi-automatic firearms and handgun ammunition in that municipality.” As if someone prepared to use an illegal handgun in Toronto would balk at driving one into Toronto.

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I don’t want to get into the argument between Allan Rock and George Washington about whether government should take citizens’ guns away then tell them what to do for their own good. Canada faces no present danger of tyranny in the classic sense, despite constant nibbling at our liberties by elected governments claiming a popular mandate for every fool thing they do. But I will say the claim that ordinary Canadians cannot be trusted with dangerous objects is, like the claim that we cannot be trusted with dangerous ideas, incompatible in principle with democracy.

I will also ask whether anyone seriously thinks it’s only difficulty acquiring a gun that prevents the average Canadian from blasting away at loved ones and random strangers. They wouldn’t put it that way, of course. But it is implicit in the tired argument that the United States has a high murder rate because Americans have more guns. Which is also an affront to that “evidence-based decision-making” we hear about more often than we see it, since statistics show no correlation between firearms ownership and murder internationally (compare Canada with Russia) or indeed between jurisdictions in the U.S. (compare “constitutional carry” Vermont with Chicago where handguns were long banned).

Photo by Tony Caldwell/Postmedia News

So what is going on? Ottawa City councillor Rawlson King, who is bringing a gun ban motion later this month, also wants a pile of money to help get at the “root cause of gun violence.” But if you want to know what’s causing increasing gun violence, surely you’d look at what has changed since it was rare.

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It’s not rising gun ownership; guns in Canada were common and mostly unregulated until the mid-20th century. And forget poverty and “exclusion” both of which have fallen dramatically since 1960. But do include semi-feral youth roaming the streets because we’ve made a virtue of vulgar, undisciplined selfishness, including those who allegedly shot an Ottawa father trying to protect his daughter from their lewdness on Friday.

Also be sure to include telling criminals potential victims are helpless as deliberate public policy. People in posh neighbourhoods with quick police response times may scoff. But Britain essentially banned civilian guns under Tony Blair, following Margaret Thatcher’s lead, and London’s murder rate recently exceeded that of New York City after centuries, with no gun control in either, where even New York’s non-gun murder rate was five times London’s. That policy sure backfired.

The more we restrict guns the more only criminals carry them

Once again, incentives matter. The more we restrict guns the more only criminals carry them, exactly as Sir John A. Macdonald warned. Thus NBC just reported people in Britain building trenches and moats to protect their property against illegal trash dumping by organized criminals, on fancy estates and ordinary working farms. But “Many victims are reluctant to go on the record about how they were targeted due to fear of reprisals.” O Brave New World.

The U.K. also has an epidemic of urban knife crime to which the official response has descended to the level of parody. Politicians propose banning home delivery of knives; stores remove kitchen knives from shelves; and police put out street-corner knife-surrender bins in case you stuck a shiv in your sock by mistake or something. So aspiring chefs suffer while any hood can sharpen metal against rock, even in prison. Give every tenth shopkeeper and homeowner a shotgun and see how many thugs pull knives, I say.

Ottawa councillor Mathieu Fleury, a handgun ban supporter in whose ward the Friday shooting happened, just asked “Who carries a gun?” Uh, that’d be criminals. If you don’t know something that obvious, please try to stay out of my newspaper. It’s so annoying it feels deliberate.