Angry in the Great White North

No Gun No Funeral is a group of Liberal Party operatives working directly for Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant to promote Bryant's idea for a total handgun ban in Canada, and coincidently, to increase Bryant's profile in the upcoming Ontario provincial election by pushing this issue.

What is a handgun ban going to accomplish? Putting aside Michael Bryant's job security, the ban is going to save lives by choking off a source of weapons used by criminals:

There are over half a million registered, legal privately owned handguns in Canada today. Thousands of those are stolen and end up on the streets of our communities. The recreational value of target shooting and gun collecting is just plain outweighed by the incredible risk to public safety posed by these weapons. How much more tragedy can we take?

Interesting how a mere 500,000 handguns are so easily targeted by thieves. I mean, of all the houses to hit in a neighbourhood, it sure sounds like those that have handguns are represented well above what you'd expect for random chance. Of course, given that responsible gun owners lock up their guns and keep ammunition locked separately, as required by law, the presence of a handgun in the home is no deterent to a would-be burglar, since the gun owner is essentially disarmed. Well, that only makes sense if the burglar knew there was a gun in the home in the first place. But I still wonder about the bad luck suffered by people who have guns in the home. It's not like someone with access to names and addresses of registered gun owners would ever leak information to organized criminal elements looking to assemble a "shopping list" of homes to target.

But this post is not about that irresponsible suggestion.

Instead, I'm struck by the image of a revolver with a twisted barrel that dominates the No Gun No Funeral website.

That is a famous sculpture by Swede Karl (or Carl) Fredrik Reutersward, gifted to the United Nations by Luxembourg in 1988, and is on the UN property in New York.

The name of the piece is "Non-violence" and Reutersward sculpted it in 1980 immediately after hearing of the murder of ex-Beatle John Lennon by Mark David Chapman.

America, Britain, Sweden, Luxembourg, the UN -- not a lot of Canadian content in this story, eh?

But here's the thing. Chapman did not steal the gun he used to shoot Lennon from someone's home, nor did he buy it from someone who had stolen it out of someone's home. Chapman legally purchased the gun for $169 at a gun store in Honolulu.

The sculpture, in the context of Canadian gun control issues, is really representative of what a lot of gun owners insist needs to be done, and that is to increase the capacity of Canadian border control officers to stop American guns, purchased easily and legally in the United States, from crossing the border into Canada, destined to be sold to criminal gangs (and of course, never to properly registered with the government).

But then that would require Canadian law enforcement to go to the time, trouble, and risk of identifying and then confronting criminal elements engaged in smuggling. A significant amount of that weapons smuggling happens on First Nations reserves spanning the Canada-US border, so there is another headache to consider. Organized crime gangs engaged in the lucrative business of gun smuggling have vast resources to use to try to bribe members of law enforcement agencies to turn a blind eye to their activities, or worse, to actively help them evade detection and capture. It certainly sounds a lot easier just to target ordinary Canadians who have followed the law and registered their guns and are known to the police already, right down to where they live. These people have no power and no resources, and so are easy pickings.

Plus they almost never vote Liberal anyway, so there's no downside for Michael Bryant.

Too bad Michael Bryant and his people didn't pick an image more appropriate to people being targeted for having obeyed the law.

I just thought that was interesting.

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