With another school shooting in the United States, the discussion surrounding firearms has erupted on social media once again with people weighing in on their thoughts surrounding the “gun culture” in the United States.
It’s always a polarizing topic with one side saying that guns don’t kill people anymore than a fork makes someone overweight, while the other side calls for increased restrictions and laws surrounding them.
I’m not sure if I can properly weigh in on the topic, I have written on it before, which has prompted phone calls and conversations with readers in the past. Canada isn’t really comparable to the United States in that we have controls in place to ensure people are educated before they are able to purchase a firearm.
I can honestly see both sides of the argument. I grew up on a farm around firearms and have my Possession and Acquisition Licence. So, I don’t see anything wrong with people having firearms – rifles and shotguns are used for hunting, .22 rifles mostly for shooting gophers, and handgun target shooting is actually quite a challenge and I enjoy attempting to garner a good grouping near the centre of the target.
At the same time firearms are dangerous in people’s hands that aren’t educated in them – even if people are told not to point the barrel at anyone, even if the firearm is empty, they accidently turn in such a way that the barrel may pass across someone – or in the hands of people who are potentially mentally unstable. When I passed the test and submitted for a restricted licence, that was the big thing the RCMP focused on – would my references be comfortable with me owning a handgun? The application also asked about people you live with and significant others or if you had an ex-husband/wife for them to contact in addition to the references you had to provide. So, before someone was given a licence, the person could be vetted. Is it a perfect system? No.
Not all guns are purchased legally in the world, so regardless of the restrictions imposed, it will never be perfect. The problem in the United States, however, is that if the government did decide they wanted to make a change to the process of acquiring a firearm, such as education and creating different levels of education and background checks… there are still all of the weapons in the country already owned by people. Do they just get grandfathered in?
So, although lawn darts killed approximately three children in 10-years and were banned… there’s still lawn darts out there, they just can’t be purchased legally anywhere. The number of lawn darts out there, however, wouldn’t be comparable to the number of firearms. So aside from grandfathering in current owners and having anyone of a certain age go through an education process and background check to be approved to inherit those firearms or else surrender them to the government, there’s nothing that can really be done.
However, in this sense we can kind of compare this to Canada. The long gun registry was a bust. Maybe someone would register one but have three long guns at home. It wasn’t abided by and couldn’t actually be tracked; it was rebuked. That’s where the issue with trying to change anything in the United States comes; any changes would be rebuked by the majority and like the long gun registry in Canada it’ll be thrown out.
So, we can discuss and say what the United States should do, keep it or change it, it’s a discussion that will simply continue because there’s really no answer one way or the other.
