Canada’s ban on handgun sales might be bigger news in the US

WASHINGTON—When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced new gun control measures for Canada in the wake of two mass shootings late last month in the US, it’s a fair bet he was looking for headlines.

And he certainly got them in the US, where his “freeze” on handgun sales and mandatory buyback for “assault-style” firearms has been alternately heralded as the common-sense step US Republicans are too maliciously pigheaded to take and pilloried as the totalitarian step US Democrats secretly want to take.

Ever since Barack Obama left the White House, Trudeau has served the US as the celebrity handsome face for a certain kind of self-righteous progressive liberalism, both for the wish-casting left and the enraged right. The imports of Trudeau clickbait for this purpose have barely slowed down since the election of President Joe Biden, who may be too old and too compulsively moderate to serve as a satisfying domestic replacement.

As is so often the case with this stuff, the perceptions here are a bit different than they may be in most of Canada. Here, right-wing politicians and social media personalities were quick to warn that this was a dystopian step to totalitarianismone that even leaves Canada vulnerable to a military invasion from the US (as if Joe Alberta with his five-round magazine was ever going to repel a wave of FA-18s). On the left, the “meanwhile in Canada” vibe was strong with here’s-what-real-gun-control-looks-like sentiment.

I’m not in Canada to gauge the chatter on the streets, but the sense I get is of a more muted reaction. Some anti-gun groups certainly greeted the news with optimism, calling it a step toward phasing out legal handguns and finally eliminating the kinds of assault-style weapons commonly used in mass shootings in the US (and in Nova Scotia).

But there’s also been the observation that handgun ownership in Canada is already fairly rare. Canadians who legally own handguns now have gone through a rigorous background check and licensing process, can mostly only carry or use them in gun clubs and must otherwise keep them locked away. Furthermore, this freeze on handgun sales and transfers does nothing to reduce the existing supply.

As for AR-15s and the like, they are also already heavily controlled in Canada. There’s a reason the gunman who killed 22 people in Nova Scotia in 2020 smuggled his firearms in from the US There’s a reason so many of the guns used in crimes — surely a whole lot, though it’s a frustratingly difficult number to pin down precisely — are brought in that way.

In Canada, pretty much the only people who carry handguns on the street are criminals and cops. And you mostly just never see semi-automatic rifles made up to look like military weapons outside of military contexts. Canadians know this, because they live with it. So the measures unveiled this week by Trudeau can be — and, I suspect, are being — read by most Canadians as a statement of values ​​as much as anything.

They will have some practical impact, although it’s hard to know how much when the details of the bill were still being finalized even as it was publicly announced. But they will also have a political impact, sending a message to Canadians who are angered and saddened by the news from Buffalo and Uvalde that their country will not tolerate the conditions that make the shootings that happened there so common in the US

That message itself highlights the stark contrast between the American and Canadian political cultures on this issue.

When I was in Uvalde last week, a tearful man who was mourning outside Robb Elementary School ranted about the blood on the hands of the politicians and gun lobbyists who fight stricter gun controls. But a brief digression in his grief-and-anger-filled outpouring of him would stand out to Canadian ears. “You know, I’m not talking about taking everybody’s guns away or anything,” he said. “It’s OK to have a handgun for protection.” This last part he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The debate even among the strident in the US is about more powerful weaponry, and about permits and background checks. This is common among the Democratic politicians most associated with gun control, who are always careful to stress they support the American Constitution’s Second Amendment right to own guns, and it’s in line with public opinion.

Polls show a majority of Americans support things like background checks and bans on assault weapons, and generally “more strict” gun laws than exist now. But 80 per cent of Americans last year told Gallup they opposed to ban on the private possession of handguns.

In Canada, a world in which almost no law-abiding citizen carries a handgun is more or less taken for granted already. In the US, that’s a world that most people do not even want to contemplate.

I suppose we’ll see what effect Canada’s newest proposed law has on gun violence in Canada. But the fact that Trudeau could be confident not just that such a law would get him headlines, but that Canadians would celebrate those headlines, is what might be most remarkable to Americans. To the extent that it is a statement of values, the fact that it’s a political slam dunk does a lot of the talking.

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