Stephen Harper is Violating Canada's Gun Laws: Hold him to Account

Over the Easter parliamentary break, the Harper government quietly extended the amnesty to gun owners for another year, allowing them not to register their long guns. The Conservative minority government does not have the votes in the House of Commons to abolish the gun registry, their true goal. Should the Conservatives win a majority of seats in the upcoming federal election, one of their first triumphalist acts will be to deep six the gun registry.

In the meantime, Stephen Harper and his government have chosen to violate the law. Stockwell Day, the responsible minister, refused to do interviews on the extension of the amnesty. In our age of narrowcasting, the government wants the amnesty message to get out to the gun lobby and gun enthusiasts without provoking a backlash among the majority of Canadians who support the gun registry and the rule of law.

The Harper government is pandering to those who buy into the gun culture’s most sacred conceit---that widespread gun ownership is needed so citizens can protect themselves, not only from criminals and lunatics, but from their own governments. No own balks at registering an automobile. Imagine how citizens would react if a provincial minority government decided to establish an amnesty to allow car owners not to register their vehicles.

In the world of the gun culture, however, the true reason for taking a “principled” stand against the registry is not the cost of registering, but the defence of the freedom to own guns without the government knowing who has them. Someday after all, the gun owners might have to form militias and take up arms against a tyrannical government, the principle that gun owners believe underlies the second amendment to the U.S. constitution.

The terrible and tragic massacre at Virginia Tech shows us what happens when psychotic individuals are allowed to purchase guns, in this case legally, to act out their homicidal and suicidal fantasies. American gun lobbyists have not been shy about doing interviews in the last few days to spell out the logic of their thinking. The real problem at Virginia Tech, they have said, is the rule that bans people from carrying guns on campus. If students and professors were allowed to carry weapons, they would make swift work of a mad assassin and thereby save lives.

In civilized countries, the theory has always been that the state should strive to have a monopoly of the means of violence. In the face of law breakers, in such countries, it is the police who use weapons to re-establish order. The American gun culture, however, advocates the vigilante alternative---the population at large should be armed to defend itself.

It is true that countries with tough gun control laws sometimes experience massacres at the hands of armed psychotics. In the developed world though, the thirty thousand people who are killed annually in the U.S. by firearms (murders, suicides, and accidents) is a completely unique case. It illustrates what happens when gun ownership is rampant.

Meanwhile, American television, as well as CBC Newsworld, has spent the last few days trying to get inside the mind of the deceased shooter. Viewers have been treated to the deranged fantasies contained in his eighteen hundred word “manifesto”. The shooter has been elevated to the status of a giant of evil.

In fact, the perpetrators of school massacres, whether at Columbine, Virginia Tech or other cases, have remarkably similar personalities and fantasies. They are lonely, deluded, powerless young males who develop a towering rage against those who have supposedly demeaned them. Any society that makes it easy for people like this to acquire guns---their way of acquiring potency---should have its collective head examined.

The trouble is that only an infinitesimal proportion of the young men who suffer from the delusions of personal impotence will ever act on them. Trying to figure out in advance which ones are dangerous is never going to work.

We can’t lock people up just because they’re weird. Setting up systems to report on weird people would lead to what doctors would call thousands of “false positives”, the harassment of people who might be dangerous but probably aren’t.

Perversely, if instead of severely restricting access to guns, the response to school shootings is massive on-campus security and huge efforts to study the minds of students, taxpayers will end up subsidizing gun ownership. It will cost many millions of dollars a year to beef up these systems.

Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is letting guns owners off so they don’t have to take the responsibility to register their weapons. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.