Canada bans most guns and has a minuscule number of gun-related homicides a year. But, worried about smuggled firearms from the United States, its government is preparing to stiffen its already tough gun laws and step up border surveillance.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised new regulations and a string of measures to counter gun smuggling, which is regarded in the United States as a dangerous problem underscoring much looser firearm laws.
The move comes as police have discovered an increased number of high-powered handguns, semiautomatic and automatic weapons in Canadian cities.
The 2002 Canadian Police Survey on Youth Gangs and other sources suggest that youth gang members cut across many ethnic, geographic, demographic and socio-economic contexts. However, youth at risk of joining gangs or already involved in gangs tend to be from groups that suffer from the greatest levels of inequality and social disadvantage.
Aboriginal youth are more vulnerable to gang recruitment and organized crime than non-Aboriginal youth and they are increasing in numbers and influence in Western Canada.
Many youth who join gangs have also been identified as youth who are using drugs and already involved in serious and violent crime. Furthermore, youth who display higher levels of previous delinquency are more likely to remain in the gang.
The reasons for joining a youth gang are various. Some seek excitement; others are looking for prestige, protection, a chance to make money or a sense of belonging.
Local officials in Surrey, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Ottawa, and Halifax have all publicly lamented the rise of gun violence in their cities, and with the absence of provincial and federal support, they have found themselves scrambling to implement their own initiatives.
In Regina, there has been a 94-per-cent increase in violent offences involving guns over the five-year average, and a 163-per-cent increase in the number of victims of firearms offences between 2015 to 2016.
People are rightly worried about their safety when shootings can happen in the institutions of learning where they send their children to school. When we are at peacetime here in Canada, and yet we find ourselves at war with ourselves coming to understand that the only ruling truth is that there is no way to predict when or where the next lunatic can pop up from. We need guns for defense from other people with guns. Its kind of a paradox. But the truth of the situation is, ignorant people are most often the most dangerous people.
There are a few simple actions that you can take to help make your home and neighborhood a safer place. First, don’t let your children be counted among the ignorant in the world. You as a parent have a responsibility to teach your children their responsibilities as a citizen of the world. These include common courtesy, and precaution against treating other people badly. If you are a gun owner, it is also your job to teach your children about gun ownership. Share with them the responsibility of keeping the family safe.
The argument for gun control is, essentially: human life is valuable, killing humans is wrong, guns kill humans, so, limit access to guns to protect human life. Liberals’ wish to protect human life, however, does not apply to everyone, since under their policies some life is not valuable, like those of the preborn.
When society arbitrarily dictates which life has value, it does two things: (1) fosters a culture where not all human life has value, so some humans can be discarded or treated less than others, to the point of killing them; and (2) says humans can arbitrarily decide which human life has value. So, aborting some (preborn) is warranted and morally acceptable because they do not have value, while aborting others (born) is unwarranted and immoral because they have value.
It’s contradictory to argue that access to an instrument (guns) should be limited because a class of people (born) have value, but simultaneously that access to other instruments (vacuum, uterine currette, syringe, embryotomy scissors, Dubois embryotomy decapitating scissors) should not be limited because a class of people (preborn) have no value.
Gun control in its current incarnation is a classic liberal solution. It’s a paint job for a crumbling house. Mainstream approaches to gun control treat mass shootings as isolated phenomena rather than central features of a divisive capitalism that pits working-class people against each other and promotes violence as a method of expression. Assailants have had a lot more in common than guns: they often found themselves at the nexus of alienation, atomization, and xenophobia.