HANNAFORD: Latest Toronto shootout confirms illegal guns are the problem

The point will no doubt be lost upon the prime minister, but last week's Toronto gangland shoot-out involved no guns that had ever been legally owned in Canada. All were smuggled in from the US..Toronto police confirm all guns involved in mass shootout were smuggled from US.As good fortune would have it — and perhaps also because among the 23 people arrested nobody had taken the firearms course in the proper use and handling of firearms — there were no injuries.Sadly that was not the case in 2020, when a lone mass murderer killed 22 people and injured three others in Nova Scotia before he was shot and killed by the RCMP.But in that case too, both guns used by the killer had been smuggled in from the US.And more often than not, that's the case. Reporting on the 113 gun-related homicides of 2022, Statistics Canada commented that "the firearms used in homicides were rarely legal firearms used by their legal owners who were in good standing." Few accused in firearm-related homicides had a valid firearm licence.Now the Government of Canada knows this. Statistics Canada is a trusted federal agency and there's a whole ministry of public safety, and the RCMP, which finds these numbers of great utility.Yet the Trudeau Liberals continue to try and restrain gun-crime in Toronto — or anywhere — by (in May 2020) prohibiting more than 1,500 makes and models of what they deemed "assault-style" firearms and their variants along with certain components. For rather obvious reasons, gangstas prefer easily concealable handguns over long guns, no matter how cosmetically attractive the latter might be (in a military way.)And indeed, two years later the Trudeau Liberals did introduce a national freeze on the transfer of handguns. (Those with a desire for more detail can consult the entire RCMP history of gun legislation, here.)However, that only affects the transfer of handguns between people who own their guns legally. Which leads us back to Toronto's mean streets, and the sad realization that nothing the Trudeau Liberals have proposed, actually addresses the problem they say they want to fix.Fortunately for law-abiding gun owners, despite having spent more than $60 million (by the Fraser Institute's count) this government has done nothing about implementing their foolish ideas. Thus, owners of 'assault-style rifles' continue in their peaceful enjoyment of same, under an amnesty that has been extended several times and now expires on October 30th 2025. By the way, for those of us with a suspicious mind, it's hard not to notice that that's just a few days after the next scheduled federal election.... But happily, In the meantime the governments of both Saskatchewan and Alberta have passed protective legislation to make a federal gun grab more difficult. And with business stalled in the House of Commons by the appalling turpitude of the Trudeau Liberals, it is hard to imagine further developments on this file before there's a change of prime minister. At this point, we would now expect the focus to switch from disarming law-abiding hunters and shooting sports enthusiasts, to getting illegal guns out of the hands of violent criminals, all of which we would applaud. But if you are struggling to make sense of a whole suite of Liberal policies ranging from climate change through monetary policy to assisted suicide, and can't find any logic to any of it, here's your answer. They don't connect cause and effect. These are people who would offer a starving man a cup of espresso. No wonder they try to solve a problem with illegal handguns in a big city, by taking away legally held long guns everywhere.

HANNAFORD: Latest Toronto shootout confirms illegal guns are the problem

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