Globe and Mail July 26   
      
   Would a ban on guns save lives?  Look at places where it did   
      
      
   The sight of children being loaded into hearses tends to focus the public   
   mind. And when young people have died of gunshot wounds, as a 10-year-old and   
   an 18-year-old did on Sunday night on a Toronto street lined with restaurants,   
   a lot of people find    
   themselves sharing the thought uttered by the city’s mayor, John Tory:   
   “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”   
      
   Leaders around the world have asked that question after kids have died in mass   
   shootings, and many countries have responded by outlawing most civilian   
   ownership of firearms.   
      
   The real question is: Would a ban work?  Or would it be an empty political   
   gesture that hassles legal gun owners instead of criminals and extremists?   
      
   The case in favour of a ban is that a lot of the weapons used by mass killers   
   and terrorists are legal.  Canada’s most horrific firearms crimes have   
   mostly been committed with legal weapons.   
      
   The 2017 Quebec City mosque massacre was carried out with the shooter’s   
   legal rifle.  So was the Moncton mass shooting of 2014 and so was Richard   
   Bain’s 2012 attempt to assassinate Quebec premier-designate Pauline Marois.    
   The awful Dawson College,    
   Concordia University and École Polytechnique massacres in Montreal were all   
   committed with weapons purchased legally.  The La Loche, Sask., school   
   shootings in 2016 and the Edmonton gun massacre of 2014 involved legal   
   firearms taken by the shooters from    
   their neighbours.   
      
   Reports suggest that the pistol used by the 29-year-old Toronto shooter was   
   part of this pattern – a weapon (legal or otherwise) taken from a Canadian   
   owner.   
      
   Indeed, Toronto’s police chief says half of the firearms used in criminal   
   offences are legal Canadian weapons that have been sold by or stolen from   
   their owners.  A B.C. government study last year found that 60 per cent of the   
   weapons used by criminals    
   there were legally and domestically sourced.   
      
   So Canadians are arguing that we could reduce tragic deaths by banning a major   
   source of firearms.  How has that worked when other places have tried it?   
      
   Australia was aghast when a man opened fire with a legal rifle on families at   
   a tourist attraction in 1996, killing 35 people, including several children.    
   Twelve days later, federal and state governments all agreed to a near-complete   
   ban on modern    
   rifles and shotguns and very tight restrictions on sporting firearms. To get a   
   licence, Australians must prove they have a “genuine reason” for a   
   weapon.  The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying back   
   650,000 firearms (the majority    
   of the country’s stock), followed by a second gun amnesty in 2016.   
      
   That ban worked.  National statistics show that deaths by firearms plummeted   
   after the ban and kept falling at a faster rate than deaths by other causes.   
   The gun-homicide rate fell to a level far lower than Canada’s (and lower   
   than other causes of    
   homicide), and Australia enjoyed a 20-year period without any mass shootings.   
      
   Germany was shocked in 2002 when an expelled student shot up his former school   
   in the eastern city of Erfurt, killing 16 people – students, staff, police   
   and himself – in the first school shooting in the country’s history.  A   
   very strict new gun    
   law followed, requiring psychiatric and anger-management tests by counsellors   
   for many people seeking licences.  After another shooting in 2009, Germany put   
   harsh restrictions on ownership of more than one weapon.  Firearm killings in   
   Germany fell    
   sharply, from more than 100 to about 50 a year (one of the world’s lowest   
   rates), and experts attribute the decline to the strict gun restrictions.   
      
   Britain was sickened in 1996 when a man used his legal firearms to kill 16   
   five- and six-year-olds and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland.  The   
   Conservative government passed a law the following year, which was   
   strengthened a few months later, that    
   banned all civilian ownership of handguns.   
      
   At first, it didn’t seem to work.  Both homicides and gun crimes rose for a   
   few years afterward – the latter in part because legal owners had become   
   illegal owners.  Starting in 2013, police began to better enforce the law,   
   with gun buybacks and    
   raids.  The gun-violence rate and the overall homicide rate immediately   
   plunged and have continued to fall; Britain has a much lower rate of both gun   
   crimes and overall murders than Canada.   
      
   Whether the gun ban played a major role is a matter of debate; Britain has   
   generally become less violent and criminal over the past 20 years (recent   
   spikes in knife crimes have not had a major effect on deaths).   
      
   Would Canada fare as well?  Some weapons will always creep in from the United   
   States.  But a ban would take care of half the supply and raise the price of   
   black-market guns.     
      
   History suggests that, in the long run, it would lead to fewer dead kids.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)