GUNTER: Here’s why Liberal gun ban won’t reduce crime

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The Liberals’ slow-motion confiscation of all handguns in the country – which is what Monday’s announcement of a freeze on handgun sales is really all about – will do nothing to reduce violent crime in Canada.

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How could it?

For instance, each year in Canada there are fewer than 800 murders. Of those, well under 300 are committed with firearms and about two-thirds of those involve handguns.

“Aha!” You say, “so those clever Liberals are onto something.”

If over the next 30 to 40 years (that’s how long it will take, using Bill C-21 to get rid of the 1.1 million handguns in Canada) we eliminate legal handguns, we might, theoretically, be able to reduce homicides by, say , 200 a year.

Except for one inconvenient little fact: Most handguns used in violent crime in Canada are not legal. Upwards of 90 per cent are smuggled in from the States. Some come from South America. The largest chunk enters through First Nations that straddle the Canada-US border.

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Since illegal handguns won’t be stopped by Monday’s freeze, no more than 20 murders a year will be prevented by seizing all the legally owned handguns in the country. And very likely fewer than that.

The feds don’t keep solid stats on legal handguns used in killings, but the last year they hazarded a guess the number was five.

Who can assure me those five murders wouldn’t have been committed with a rifle or shotgun or knife, if a handgun hadn’t been available?

Law-abiding handgun owners (who are the only Canadians covered by Monday’s freeze) rarely commit crimes. Indeed, Gary Mauser, a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, has shown that legal handgun owners are so thoroughly screened criminally and psychologically before being granted a handgun permit they are only half as likely to commit crimes as the general population.

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We have one-quarter as many guns per capita as the Americans, but only about one-sixth or fewer firearms deaths each year (murders and suicides). We’re just not a killing nation.

Monday’s freeze, which will make it illegal to buy, sell, trade, give away or import handguns, also requires that as current owners die, their pistols and revolvers be turned over to the government for destruction. Moreover, the government has not promised to pay compensation for this seizure of private property.

Remember after the mass shooting in Nova Scotia in 2020, this same government announced a ban on “assault-style” weapons, too. Initially, these high-powered rifles could be kept until the current owner died, just like handguns.

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Then the Liberals changed their minds and said all the assault rifles had to handed in by this April. Then they extended that deadline to October 2023. Then Monday they promised the hand-in would take place by the end of this year.

No one knows what the Liberals are doing (other than issuing grandiose promises to make themselves look tough on crime), because they don’t know what they’re doing.

But, “Aha!” you say again. “At least, in this latest round of gun controls, the Trudeauvians are increasing the maximum sentence for gun smuggling and for selling illegal guns from 10 to 14 years.”

However, at the same time the Liberal government is getting rid of the mandatory minimum sentence of five years for “using a firearm in commission of a crime, possessing a restricted or prohibited weapon without a license, possessing a loaded handgun, possessing a weapon obtained through crime, weapons trafficking or using a gun to commit robbery or extortion.”

Almost no one is sentenced to maximum penalties, but thousands of gun criminals will spend less time in prison as a result of the Liberals doing away with mandatory minimums.

Still think the Liberals’ measures will reduce crime?