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What’s still more horrifying is that Lewis had honestly and faithfully filled out the paperwork. Justice Graham pulled his application form and reviewed it, and found that Lewis had honestly answered yes when asked whether he’d suffered from mental health issues during the last five years, if he’d been reported to the police or social services for violence, and if he’d been subject of a protection order. Calls were made to character references who said they foresaw no issues, Lewis’s widow also said she foresaw no problems. That was about the extent of the screening, in part, Justice Graham heard from a firearms officer in Alberta, out of concern for Lewis’s privacy.

You can fault the friends who vouched for him or the widow or not having said more when she had the chance. But you can’t blame them for the ultimate tragedy — that’s on the system. Lewis was a textbook case of someone who should never have been able to legally buy guns, where the evidence was public record and where he was even honest about his history. Any gun control system that can’t weed out a guy like this isn’t working.

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I’ve no real enthusiasm for the notion of deeper, more intrusive background checks for gun owners, especially because I’ll be renewing my own licence in a few years, under a federal government that gun owners expect to be less friendly toward them than the last. But there are times when an application should be scrutinized very, very carefully — and this is one of them.