Gun Control

There has been another shooting in an American University. At around 3pm today, a gunman walked into a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on fellow students, killing five people and injured 16 others.

This is the fourth shooting at a U.S. school within a week. In fact, it is the sixth this year, and the ninth since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 where a mentally deranged student killed 32 people.

In Canada, we've had seven school shootings in the history of our country.

The first incident, in 1975, where a student murdered a teacher and classmate, was so traumatizing that our government decided to start regulating the sale of guns. In 1989, after the mentally ill Marc Lépine walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal with a firearm and coldly executed fourteen women students, the devastation was such that the government decided to toughen gun control policies once more and create the national gun registry program, which, despite its huge cost, is popular with policemen across the country.

The young student who killed 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech in 2007 got his weapons from a licensed dealer and his ammunition from EBay.
The two students responsible for the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 got one weapon from a friend and another from salesman at the Tanner Gun Show.

In Canada, it's possible for almost everyone over 18 without a criminal record to get firearms. But the procedure is long and complicated, and you almost always have to register your gun with the government before being able to buy it. This makes it much less likely that a mentally ill student would kill peers out of revenge, as it forces that student to go through the long procedure of registering the gun, which takes a significant amount of time and patience, and increases the likelihood of that student being picked out as underage or unfit to own a gun. The student can't simply go to Canadian Tire, show identification proving he/she is over 18, and purchase the weapon.

The Harper Government has made it clear that it wants to scrap the national gun registry program, and has already exempted certain kinds of hunting rifles. It is undeniable that the cost of the gun registry program is extremely high (over a billion dollars), but judging by the low per-capita rate of school shootings and gun crimes in our country, it's part of a system that works.

Consider these figures: in the year 2000, the firearm homicide rate in Canada was 0,54 in 100 000. In the U.S., it was 2,97 in 100 000.

The gun registry program itself might not be the main factor explaining the low firearm homicide rate, but when a system as important as this one in working, we should be real conservatives and leave it as is. A billion dollars might be a very substantive amount of money, but if it helps keep the gun homicide rate this low, it's money well spent.