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This isn’t hard to understand. Toronto is not the first city in the world to have a problem with gang violence. The police are saying clearly that they know that the violence is linked to the gangs; they have said recently (and many times before) that the majority of handguns being used in crimes in Toronto are smuggled into the country illegally. I’m not going to suggest for an instant that solving these problems is going to be easy. But they aren’t mysterious. We know what the problem is: retaliatory violence between street gangs armed with weapons mostly smuggled in from the United States.

In other words, this is not a gun-control problem.

We know what the problem is: retaliatory violence between street gangs

I support gun control. Always have. I own firearms and am fully compliant with the laws — including some that are stupid and cumbersome and generate needless paperwork hassles while contributing nothing to public safety. If I had a magic wand to fix Canada’s gun-control laws, I’d cut back on some of the silly red tape but also get tougher in some areas. The system isn’t perfect and can be improved in ways that would satisfy both the left and right (not at the same time, mind you).

But before we can have that conversation, we need to understand what problems we’re trying to address. And shootings in Toronto and our other large cities really aren’t it. Those shootings are problems, of course, but not ones with Canada’s gun laws. They won’t be solved by changing those laws, either.

But we’ll have the same debates over and over again. Millions of Canadians, including a dispiriting numbers of our elected officials, will continue to pretend that cracking down on a well-regulated group of law-abiding private gun owners is a meaningful response to a real but unrelated gang-violence problem. These proposals will continue to be popular because they’ll sound good to the majority of Canadians who don’t know the first thing about how our gun-control laws actually work and whose knowledge and opinions on the subject have been informed by their exposure of news of tragedies in the U.S.