In Glen McGregor’s Feb 10 news story in the Ottawa Citizen, he faithfully follows some of the oldest strategies of the anti-gun debate. He begins by setting the stage, where the “country awoke to images of gunman ... in sinister poses with the futuristic black rifle.” One can admire the symbolism, the country – sleeping soundly in its safe little bed - “awoke” as doubtless it should “awake” to the “sinister” new threat, of a “futuristic black rifle (a Beretta CX4 Storm). Clearly, Glen is setting this up as a new problem, to which the country has only just “awoke” and dare we say it, the wave of the “future” should we fail to act. He underlines the newness of the “threat” by noting that the rifle only entered the Canadian market “two years earlier.”

This, somewhat breathless, approach doubtless sells newspapers but a reality check is in order. If one moves beyond the irrelevance of the gun’s colour and the equal irrelevance of its shape, we are looking at a low powered semi-automatic carbine. Rifles of this type have been common for over a century. The M1 carbine often seen in WWII movies is an example. Specifically, a carbine is an intermediate sized rifle that is bigger than a pistol but smaller than a full sized rifle. Carbines are usually designed to use a low power rifle cartridge. It is the cartridge, the bullet and the powder charge, that determines how powerful the gun is. In this case, the rifle used a pistol cartridge (9mm) that is significantly less powerful than most cartridges uses in carbines and dramatically less powerful than a full rifle cartridge. Indeed, it is only a mid-range pistol cartridge. The hard fact of the matter is that once one gets past the “futuristic” design and "colour" of the rifle, its lack of power is a major reason why so few of the victims died. Our “new threat” is a type of gun that has been common for a century and this particular example is dramatically less powerful than other rifles available in Canada.

Glen asserts that the pictures, of the rifle, were “a glimpse into a broken mind” and for “some” a “sales pitch.” Get the connection? Rifle = broken mind, want the rifle = broken mind, perhaps even “want a gun = broken mind. He substantiates this sick, even sinister desire, with the fact that registrations “tripled” after the shooting with 46 Storms registered, up from 16 the month before. Glen informs us that this is no “statistical blip” since only 9 Storms were registered in that month the year before. According to Glen, the “immediate reaction” of gun owners to the tragedy was a “rush to buy the gun that the shooting suddenly made infamous.”

A further reality check is in order. How many people honestly believe that gun owners in Canada reacted any differently then the rest of Canadians? How many people honestly believe that gun owner’s “immediate reaction” was to go get one of these now “infamous” guns. Not that this sort of slander is uncommon, demonising gun owners is a shop worn staple of anti-gun rhetoric. A little math demonstrates how true these assertions are. There are over 2.3 million gun owners in Canada. The 46 people who bought Storms, even if we assume they were attracted because it was “infamous” represent (46/2.3 million) 0.002 %, that is 2 thousandths of one percent of gun owners. No proof of the “bought due to infamy” theory is offered.

As to the, available for two years factoid, does anyone think that “available” means that every gun store in Canada had one available immediately? One might assume that these numbers are merely the normal pattern of new product distribution. Glen does mention the fear that this gun will be banned as an incentive to purchase; a very reasonable fear due to politically expedient gun bannings that have followed other tragedies. The previous Liberal gun ban “prohibited” 555,000 handguns without compensation to their legal owners and without the faintest shred of evidence that these guns, of the “wrong size” or “wrong calibre” were in any way more prevalent in crime or violence (Statistics Canada 2005 Homicide report). We can also note that “46 guns” up from the previous month’s “16 guns,” is an increase of 30 guns (Canada-wide). Compared to the number of guns in Canada (30/ 7.4 million guns) this amounts to a “surge” of .0004%, that is 4 ten thousandths of one percent of the gun stock. Mr. McGregor does not consider this a “statistical blip” and proves the point by referencing the fact that only nine Storms were sold on that month the previous year when they were just starting to be introduced to Canada.

Glen demonstrates the universality of his concerns by noting that both the Conservative and the Liberals are concerned about “restricted weapons.” He fails to mention that the Conservative government, which “has mused publicly about making restricted weapons harder to get,” has rejected this policy as ineffective. The Liberal Party has gone further. The Liberals adopting a motion (number 42) asserting that whereas “automatic and semi-automatic weapons are illegal for hunting purposes and whereas “automatic and semi-automatic weapons do not support the hunting culture” they declared an official policy to “support legislation to eliminate the personal use of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.” The policy was quietly disavowed when they discovered that both ‘whereas” statements were incorrect.

One might wonder if all Liberal policies receive this much thought. Semi-automatic firearms have been legally used for hunting since the 1890’s and over half of all Canadian firearm owners own a semi-automatic firearm. Glen notes that of “720,000 semi-automatic rifles registered in Canada ... only 25,000 of those are restricted or prohibited” usually because of barrel length and the unproven theory that a trivial difference of a few inches will make a gun “concealable.” No compensation for the confiscation of millions of dollars worth of legally owned property is being discussed. As to the move to ban automatic weapons (machine guns), these have been registered since 1951 and banned in Canada since 1976. We might also note that the majority of guns in Canada are used for recreational shooting at licensed ranges not hunting.

Glen then goes on to describe the connection between Canada’s gun laws and the Montreal Massacre in 1989. He notes that among other things, the size of magazines for semi-automatic rifles was limited to five rounds and handgun magazines were limited to 10 rounds. He than worries, that the Storm was occupying a “grey zone within the law.” This “grey zone” was caused by the Storm’s having magazines identical to pistol magazines. Indeed, the Canadian Firearms Centre issued a bulletin warning gun shops that 10-round magazines stamped with the name CX4 Storm were illegal, but the identical magazine without the Storm stamp was allowed. Glen notes this “bizarre bureaucratic distinction” was not a “trivial one” in light of the details of the Dawson College shootings where the murdered girl was shot nine times. Even assuming the killer used a ten round magazine, no evidence is presented that he could not have achieved the same effect by changing magazines.

There are a number of complex issues raised by Glen’s assertions. The first is the traditional fixation of anti-gun arguments with the technical details of the gun. The second is the connection gun regulations have with the Montreal Massacre. We can address both these issues by examining why the Massacre led to stricter gun laws.

In 1989, the police arrived at the scene of the Montreal massacre some 12 minutes after the shooting started. At that time, they were clearly aware that people were being shot in the building, this information had been relayed to them prior to their arrival and they could hear shots being fired in the building. Students, some wounded, were coming out of the building informing them where the gunman was and that he was continuing to murder students. The police spent the next 15 minutes standing outside the building without taking any action to actually deal with the murderer. It was only after the murder committed suicide that they entered the building.

The official Coroners report stated, “Throughout all that time, the police actions consisted of securing a security perimeter and evacuating the crowd. At the point when it was announced that the suspect had killed himself, there was a very large number of police officers on the scene ... When it was announced that the suspect had killed himself, therefore, the police were waiting for reinforcements. At that point, no intervention operation was underway and none was in the process of being executed, or even being formulated.” The Coroners report goes on to note that the rifle used had little relevance to the tragedy stating that “With the unlimited ammunition and time that Marc Lépine had available to him (author’s note: 60 rounds were found), he would probably have been able to achieve similar results even with a conventional hunting weapon, which itself is readily accessible.”

These facts raised a number of issues the government of the day did not want to discuss, much less debate. It has been a settled part of government policy to discourage self-defence, often to the point of legally harassing people who defend themselves, especially if they defend themselves with a weapon. It is illegal to carry a “weapon” of any kind for self-defence, people are instructed to passively obey violent criminals rather than resist. Gun storage laws are now specifically structured to make guns unavailable for defence. All of these policies are justified by the assertion that self-defence is no longer required since the police protect us. The actions of the police in Montreal brought all of these policies and the official assertion of police protection into dispute. We can also note that the tragedy highlighted the fact that the police have no legal duty to protect anyone, nor are they legally required to even attempt to protect anyone. The result of these policies is that the government has severely curtailed the right (and ability) of citizens to protect themselves without taking any legal responsibility for their protection. Diverting the debate onto guns was a way around these issues.

The results of this diversion have been problematic. The crime and public safety debate, as Glen demonstrates, continues to revolve around technical minutia of guns and government policy continues to prioritize gun control over criminal control. Focusing on the gun law issue, we can note that the current gun laws suffer from three fatal problems. They assume that a purely administrative system of paperwork controls equals physical control, they focus almost exclusively on irrelevant technical details and they are aimed at the wrong people.

The first problem is the somewhat mindless belief that having a description of the gun on file controls the gun and its owner. In both Montreal shootings and a number of other recent high profile shootings the fallacy of this “sympathetic magic” approach to gun control is demonstrated. A person bent on murder is not “controlled” by administrative restrictions or paperwork requirements. Despite Glen’s assertion that the Firearm Centre’s magazine bulletin was not “trivial,” it had no impact on the behaviour of the murderer. Yet the fundamental belief underlying our current gun laws it the belief that administrative regulation equals gun control. Presumably, if enough “do something” laws and regulations are passed and attached to the same problem some sort of quantitative process kicks in and a criminal undeterred by ten laws will be deterred by eleven laws. There is not the slightest empirical evidence that this is true.

The second problem is the almost exclusive focus on technical details. For example, the dividing line between prohibited, restricted and non-restricted firearms rests on barrel length. This is “justified” by the theory that concealable weapons are more dangerous to public safety and need closer regulation. Unfortunately, there is no meaningful difference in difficulty between concealing a pistol with a barrel just under 4 inches (prohibited) and a pistol with an eight-inch barrel (restricted). In both Montreal shootings, the murderer had no difficulty whatsoever concealing a rifle; so what does regulating pistols on the basis of fractions of an inch in barrel length accomplish? It would be nice to believe that the line between legal and illegal had more to justify it than irrelevant minutia. Unfortunately, huge areas of the law do just that and “grey areas” are more the rule than the exception. In part, this is the result of a political expediency that prefers demonizing guns on the basis of their appearance to addressing more fundamental issues. In part, it is the result of a massively bureaucratic administrative system coming up against almost bottomless variations in firearms. Some authors, such as David Tomlinson of the National Firearms Association, have spent years demonstrating, in detail, the dysfunctional interface between the regulations and guns in the real world.

The third problem is that the current gun laws focus on the wrong people. Rather than focus on misuse of firearms (already fully addressed in great detail by criminal law) they focus on the regulation of the law abiding. As the Auditor General has pointed out (Report to Parliament 2002) “excessive regulation had occurred because ... some of the partners believed that the use of firearms is in itself a "questionable activity" that required strong controls.” With actual misuse of firearms already covered by criminal law, the new regulations criminalized the violation of arbitrary administrative regulations even when there was no criminal intent or harm. This approach led to a system that impacted the law abiding not criminals. A few statistics demonstrate how skewed this approach is. According to Statistics Canada (study of 5,194 homicides between 1997 & 2005), only 2.27% of homicides were committed with a registered gun, only 1.21% were committed with a registered firearm that was owned by the accused. We can also note that 64% of accused murderers had a criminal record (which bars them from legal firearms possession), 45% of murders occurred while a crime was in progress and 22% of murder victims were involved in illegal activities.

Overall, one might question Glen’s handling of the issue, but little of what has been discussed here is relevant to anti-gunners. For the most part, they tend to pursue gun restrictions and gun eliminations for symbolic and emotional reasons. The agenda is one of social engineering to eliminate a part of Canada’s heritage still embraced by millions of Canadians, the “gun culture.” For others the motivation is the political desire to avoid issues that conflict with their preferred policies. The major voice for gun control in Canada is the “grassroots” organization Coalition for Gun Control. This group has received over $400,000 from the Liberals to petition the government to support the governments own policies; in the US they would call it an “astroturf” group. With public safety involved, one might hope for a more evidence driven approach to the gun and crime debate in Canada.