Stop the violence, Editorial, Dec. 6

Yes, the gun massacre at École Polytechnique was the same kind of empowered hatred of women that leads to women fleeing with their children to shelters, or to racially motivated murders. But no, Dec. 6 is not the time to lump together mass shootings with less life-threatening gropings and indecent speech directed at women, because the intentional murder of women must not be trivialized.

The Justin Trudeau Liberals have done nothing yet to reverse the Stephen Harper Conservatives’ unconscionable weakening of gun control. During the last year of the Harper mandate, there were three gun massacres of women and their children committed in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario, yet these murders were never high on Mr. Harper’s radar, because guns were involved and the Conservatives rely heavily on gun lobby support.

Toronto Mayor John Tory should push the feds to get much more deeply into the gun business, to ban home gun collecting and to open the federal armouries as places where those minimally vetted men who wish to collect the weapons used by soldiers and police officers may do so, but only under state-of-the-art secure, alarm-protected conditions.

All crime guns start out as legal guns. All three politically and racially motivated mass shootings here in Canada (Moncton, Montreal, Quebec City) were committed by legal gun owners. Let’s not join the Americans in their firearms follies.

Ron Charach, Toronto