Vol 12 No 49

Canada's major cities are experiencing epidemics of violence, including a spate of shootings associated with nightclubs and drug gangs.

Whatever happened to "gun control"? Remember Bill C-68? Wasn't that supposed to make us safer and reduce gun-related crime?

Canada had adequate handgun control for decades. The additional registration of long-guns was a deceptive swindle. We don't know whether Government-friendly firms got contracts; we don't know whether the real motive was the eventual confiscation of guns owned by law-abiding citizens (as has happened in other nations that started with registration). But we do know gun registration wasted at least a billion dollars to achieve nothing at all-certainly not the reduction in crime that was promised.

The reason that the promise of public safety couldn't be kept is simple: C-68 penalizes the ownership of guns, not the criminal use of guns.

And here's a news flash for the federal Cabinet: criminals rarely register their guns.

Instead of registering all firearms, Parliament should have modified the Criminal Code so that the stipulated penalties for any crime would automatically be doubled if a firearm was used; doubled again if the firearm was loaded; and tripled on top of that if the gun were discharged during the crime. That is, we should penalize the criminal mis-use of guns.

There's also a larger social issue involved in the problem of violent crime: we have forbidden schools to teach the culture upon which Canada-indeed, all western civilization-was founded; instead, they've substituted a Humanist ethic rooted in the addlepated philosophy of postmodernism, which denies the existence of truth, and makes all ethics relative.

In consequence, violent crime is out of control.

I know StatsCan says it's not-and that's true in the recent short-term; but the fact is that violent crime, per capita, is up about 350% since the 1950s, and rape (which StatsCan has defined out of existence) is up about 470%. Home invasions are a brand-new phenomenon of this woeful era.

Thus the police are no longer able to protect us. All they can do is give us a case file number to use in our insurance claims-if we survive the crime.

In such a circumstance, people will soon demand the right to defend themselves. It is interesting to note that in American counties which have enforced "right to carry" laws (in the 38 states that have already passed such laws), rates of violent crime decreased dramatically. If we exclude drug-related inner-city crime from the statistics, the USA is no more violent than Canada; and America has actually become less violent than the UK, which has some of the most stringent gun control laws in the world.

The answer to criminal use of guns is straightforward: penalize the offense, not the ownership of guns.

Link: http://www.chp.ca