Guns don’t kill people, stupid liberal laws do
The other side of the story
Stephen McCreary, Volunteer Staff
When Marc Lépine entered École Polytechnique in 1989 with the intention of killing as many women as possible, he knew he would not face any resistance. In what would eventually be known as the Montreal massacre, he waltzed into the school, separated the males and the females, and shot 28 women — killing 14 of them.
This horrible event had several ramifications — it rocked the it-could-never-happen-here mentality held by many Canadians, while the Ontario Provincial Police implemented new measures for dealing with school shootings. But, in a backwards move, Jean Chrétien’s Liberals drafted Bill C-68, which ensured that every hunter, target shooter and gun collector in the country would henceforth face red tape, fees and hassles when trying to own and operate firearms.
When an innocent bystander was shot on the streets of Toronto in January, once again the anti-gun crusaders came out in full force. “Is Handgun Ban Next?” splashed across the CBC news screen as Ontario politicians posed for photo-ops and praised the idea.
Apparently, no one learned from the failure of Chrétien’s gun registry. It was hailed as an answer to gun crime when it was implemented by the Liberals but turned out to be nothing more than a money pit, swallowing up billions of taxpayer dollars while having little to no effect on crime.
Proponents of gun control legislation love to point out that crime has gone down in Canada over the decades, somehow equating a miniscule drop in crime with a weak Liberal bill that five million gun owners are still not complying with. Overall, crime has actually gone up and down by such paltry amounts over the years that no conclusion can be derived in favour or against any legislation. And in large urban centres (you know, where guns are a real problem), the rate of young people using guns for violent crimes is actually going up!
Liberals also love to point to the United States in support of their anti-gun stance. Of course they rarely present any real statistics to back up their claims — they just point in a general southern direction, mumble something stupid and walk away with their smug, self-righteous noses held high in the air. They ignore the fact that the United States has 10 times our population living in a smaller geographic area. They ignore the importance of poverty and the vast discrepancy between the rich and the poor that is not nearly as accentuated here in Canada. They ignore the American libertarian mindset. They ignore the tense race relations that have plagued American society since confederation. No, when it comes to guns, the intellectual liberals simply notice that the United States has more guns and more crime, therefore more guns equals more crime. The same flakes who work feverishly to underscore the fact that we Canadians are absolutely nothing like our southern neighbours seem to think that as soon as we are allowed to carry guns, we’ll all whip them out and start shooting each other.
In reality, guns have saved countless lives in school shootings in the United States over the years. On January 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa went to school at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va. with a gun. He shot six people, killing the school dean, a professor and one student. Since most American schools have nonsensical no-guns policies, Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges ran to their cars to retrieve their guns. Together, they were able to disarm Odighizuwa, and there would be no further victims that day, thanks to armed resistance. In 1997, at Pearl High School in Mississippi, Luke Woodham killed his mother and headed off to school with the intention of killing as many students as possible. He killed two students and wounded seven others before heading to Pearl Middle School with the intention of killing more. Joel Myrick, the assistant principal, heard the gunshots, retrieved his handgun from his car, and stopped the teen before Woodham could do any more damage.
There is not enough room in this column to include even a fraction of the documented incidents defused by armed resistance.
During a discussion on this topic last week in a class here in Winnipeg, numerous students refused to accept the above points and instead echoed what many clueless politicians argue: that an all-out gun ban is the only real option to deal with crime. With drugs, left-wingers constantly tell us that the best solution is to legalize them. And since prostitution has been around “forever,” we should legalize that, too. But when it comes to guns, which have been around for hundreds of years and are prevalent in every part of our society, they suddenly think we can just ban the problem away.
School shootings can happen anywhere, anytime. If, God forbid, a crazed gunman entered one of my classes and began shooting, I would feel a hell of a lot better knowing that we at least had the option to defend ourselves. In any one of my classes, several of the students are experienced members of the military and would surely know how to use a firearm responsibly — as would anyone else with firearm training. As it stands now, this option is not even available to us.
Who knows how many lives could have been saved at Dawson College, Concordia University or W.R. Myers High School had victims been allowed to shoot back? Unfortunately, it is too late to know. But by refusing to allow law-abiding citizens to defend themselves, effectively giving crazed gunmen packs of sitting ducks, we are only ensuring that it will happen again.
Stephen McCreary is a third-year political studies student.
