Saturday, December 31, 2005

Gun Grabbers Unload At Uncle Sam

The Toronto Star would disappoint its readership if it didn't whip up anti-American sentiment in the wake of the downtown Boxing Day shootout that left Jane Creba dead, six others wounded, and politicians promising everything short of help.

And true to form, we have a Wendy Cukier editorial disguised as a news article:

Canada needs tough gun control laws, says a Toronto expert, but lawmakers are up against a global arms "epidemic" that has circulated millions of weapons around the world, destabilizing countries and undermining cities.

And, says Wendy Cukier, professor of criminal justice at Ryerson University, the latest Toronto police figures — obtained through a Freedom of Information request — show that 52 per cent of handguns seized as "potential crime weapons" in 2004 came from the United States.

"The majority of those guns come from over the border," she says. "And the ones that are reported as legally registered in Canada may also be manufactured in the U.S."


....

"I knew that 230 million guns were owned by people in the United States, which is almost one per person," said Cukier, a founder of the Coalition for Gun Control and co-author of The Global Gun Epidemic. "But I also discovered that there are 700 million guns in the entire world, including those held by the military. The U.S. has about one-third of the world's supply."


....

Once guns enter countries, Cukier says, the effect is "like a cancer. It affects the whole system. And once you have it, there is no simple treatment."

The handgun Toronto police seized in the Castle Frank subway station after the Boxing Day shooting was identified as a 9mm Ruger semi-automatic. It's manufactured by a U.S. company an American shooting magazine describes as having "a profound impact on shaping the tastes of shooters and anchoring the semi-automatic concept in the general firearms market place."


Guns don't find markets without willing buyers. They don't thrust themselves into the hands of peaceful, law-abiding citizens, turning them into bloodthirsty killers. The people who want guns for illegitimate purposes will go to great lengths to get them, no matter how many laws are thrown up in their way.

If you want to cut off the supply of illegal guns, cut off the demand from criminals.

And work with legitimate gun owners and dealers. They know what genuine gun control is: gun owners knowing how to control their guns, because they've been trained to handle them responsibly.

There is no great mystique in firearms, once you actually handle them; they're a tool like any other.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does Cukier and her band of clowns get funding from tax dollars. I would hope that a new government would cut off funding to all the left wing special interest groups.

Anonymous said...

A tool like any other.

Except that they are a tool with one purpose, to kill. So that means they are only a tool like any other tool designed to kill. Or threaten to kill.

And then they are extremely efficient, requiring little training or preparation to use. Compared with other tools that are designed, or can be used to kill.

So really, they're not a tool like any other, are they? A little different from a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a drill, or a shovel.

Pretending that you can cut off the demand for such tools, by people who's primary objective is to kill or control is beyond disingenuous. It is much more realistic to expect the civil population to disarm, regardless of their reasons for owning such tools.

Anonymous said...

You know, it's telling when even the gun lobby believes it cannot spin past the truth:

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Gun lobby scraps ads in wake of Toronto shooting

"The campaign, by the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action and the Canadian Shooting Association, had been designed to argue that responsible gun owners are not at the root of the crime problem. At first, the lobby groups intended to present the campaign despite the Dec. 26 crime that horrified the country, when a teenage girl died and six others were injured as gunfire erupted on a busy Toronto street. The campaign's organizers later decided to cancel the ads, however."

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If there really were merit to the claim that there is a difference between responsible gun owners and criminals who give them a bad name, it would seem that this would be the perfect time to point that out. But even the gun hawks cannot stomach the hypocrisy of that. Guns do kill people. Only an idiot pretends otherwise.