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Democracy and guns

May 8, 2020   ·   0 Comments

By Laura Campbell

Well, no surprise, but Prime Minister Trudeau’s assault rifle ban announcement has raised the ire of some gun owners and those concerned about our democratic process. Many of them make valid arguments. That’s one of the most complicated parts of this whole thing: the arguments both for/against a ban on some semi-automatic rifles are strong. Perhaps this is why the debate, even between the most chummy of debaters (like those I have with my libertarian buddies) remains eternally unsettled. 

Before I delve into this, I’d like to state right out of the gate that I grew up with hunters in my family. My grandfather was a hunter. It defined him in the deepest way. It was in part through his love of hunting, and its relationship with conservation, that I grew into an environmentalist. I feel strongly that meat harvested from the wild is the most ethical, and those who have the access and capacity to hunt are very lucky. My husband is also a hunting enthusiast, as are some of his closest friends. This is all to say, I am both interested in guns, and am not naive to how this will impact the hunting world. A small minority of hunters will have to adjust their hunt (I don’t personally know any hunters who choose an AR-15 as their platform, but let’s assume that there are some). 

But this ban has nothing to do with hunters. Hunting is important and welcomed, especially by our government, including many who were elected by legal gun owners (yay democracy!). There are hunters in the Liberal Party, in the NDP, among Greens, the Bloc, and the Conservative Party. More crucially, this ban is also not about ‘the state’ slowly taking away ‘all of the guns’ so they can impose some kind of control over society. And indeed, that concern is shared among some of the people who are deeply opposed to this ban. It’s about the freedom to protect oneself from a tyrannical government. 

Unfortunately, our freedoms in 2020 cannot be won through ‘self-protection’ ‘insulation from the outside’ or ‘lone-survival.’ For those of you who read my column a few weeks ago, you’ll remember that research shows that we don’t survive alone. We survive by collaboration. We survive by participating in our democratic system. That is how we prevent tyranny. Of course COVID-19 offers us the best example of how survival is possible (both economic and physiological) through collaboration, and through the support of the welfare state we all participated in building. We, Canadians, built this. And we should be proud of it. 

And yet the fantasy lives on. It goes like this: ‘If the government turns and comes for us, I’ll be able to defend myself if I have a few semi-automatic weapons stashed in the basement.’ With a 5-round magazine that you shot two years ago at a range with your buddy? Unlikely. The best way to protect ourselves from tyranny is to participate in democracy and be vigilant about the forces of extremism (be clear about what is objectively extreme). 

Perhaps the decision by Trudeau to announce this ban through an order-of-council, as opposed to letting it pass in the House, could be considered an example of democracy eroding (as I understand, it will still be debated and legislation around the ban will likely pass with the support of the opposition). Or perhaps it’s a moment in time that is anti-democratic, but not foundationally so. Perhaps conservatives can recall when Stephen Harper prorogued parliament. Constitutionally legal, but not, by definition, a ‘democratic’ move. And indeed, our democracy is far from perfect. Our voting system is the best example of that. However, it is the extraordinary circumstance of what just happened to Nova Scotians (and by extension, to all of us), that led Trudeau to make this happen quickly through an order-of-council, rather than legislation. It’s important to recognize that context, and accept it as justified.  Context is everything. 

The government doesn’t believe that this ban will solve all gun crime. That is a much more complex beast. And we shouldn’t assume that this is the only measure our federal government has taken. But much of the onus rests with other institutions. Our provincial governments and their partners in law enforcement have entire brain trusts devoted to this. But there isn’t enough money, and not equally spent across Canada. It is extremely expensive to trace the source of guns seized from criminals. Indeed, in September 2019, the Globe and Mail, through a months-long investigation, concluded that the RCMP has very little clue about where exactly illegal guns are coming from. We can’t actually definitively say that they’re all coming from the States. Indeed, the Danforth shooter’s gun was initially stolen from a remote location in Saskatoon. Toronto Police have a specialized division that is able to trace guns, which is how this was discovered. Most police divisions do not have those resources. 

Mental health treatment is the other big area that needs both attention and more funding. And therein lies some of the most complex conversation around mass shooting. And much of this conversation should be left to psychological and psychiatric professionals. To understand what drives people to commit such heinous acts is dark work, and requires years of research. 

What we do know is that Alexandre Bisonette was obsessed with guns. And the gun ban does get at one of those key common denominators of mass shooters. In my opinion, these men are driven by a both physical and (especially) aesthetic obsession with power and control. An unknown and uncontrollable rage is translated into a desire to inflict harm with a particular ‘type’ of weapon. The most powerful organizations in the world are armies, not friendly neighbourhood hunters. This is why the weapon of choice for mass shooters is an AR-15, not a bushcraft equivalent. Because mass shooters are not just shooting for the sake of killing; they are also performing something. For themselves, and for others. They are, as of late, often involved in online communities of the hyper-nationalist, racist variety. In jurisdictions, such as the U.S. with less gun control, those communities assemble as ‘militias.’ The type of weapons they stock are ‘military-style’ because they conceive of themselves as an army, whether they are a ‘lone-wolf’ or part of a group. The New Zealand shooter’s manifesto was not produced in a vacuum in that man’s mind. We need to make sense of this, and face it head on. 

This is why ‘assault-style’ is the moniker for the weapons that have been banned. Legal gun owners point out that there are still rifles available that have, in theory, the same capacity as those that are banned. But for mass shooters, there is a secondary, underlying motivation to their killing. And if we can, at the very least, remove the source of that motivation, we are making some progress. It’s not nearly enough, but we’ve got to start somewhere.


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