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John R. Lott, Jr. and Gary Mauser

It seems obvious: ban guns and there won’t be any gun crime.

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After two people were killed and 13 injured in a July shooting in Toronto’s Greektown neighbourhood, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered his government to assess the idea of “a full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada.” They are scheduled to finish the assignment by the end of the year.

Here is a simple question for Canada to answer: has a single place, anywhere in the world, ever seen its murder rate decline after banning all handguns or all guns?

We can’t find such a place. Every single time that guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up — often several-fold.

Handgun homicides continued to rise after Canada’s 1995 ban on more than half of all legally registered handguns. Americans tried to completely ban handguns in Chicago and Washington D.C., and saw murder and violent crime soar. Gun control advocates argued that these aren’t fair test cases because criminals could bring in guns purchased outside of city limits. But that argument can’t account for why rates of violence exploded in both places.