You might think that is reductio ad absurdum but it's not like I made those things up about Australia. Britain has banned all handguns but they have still had a massive increase of "gun violence". It's not like Britain has a porous border with the US, they're a freaking island and they can't prevent gangs from getting and using handguns! Germany has stiff gun control and they, too, suffer mass shootings. So what makes Kinsella think banning already severely restricted handguns will help? Read this and see:
I’m a gun owner. I don’t think hand guns are needed to hunt. They’re designed to do one thing: kill people. That’s it. My suggestion is this: let’s try something new, and ban handguns. If that doesn’t work, you can go back to your proud old conservative tradition of doing absolutely nothing, and letting children get murdered, okay?”And there you have it. We don't "need" hand guns so let's ban them and see. Let's steal a few billion in legally owned property from Canadians who have jumped through all the government set hoops in order to buy that property and see if that helps. And if it doesn't, well I guess we can always unmelt those guns, right?
Not exactly. Kinsella, like Chretien before, doesn't actually plan to seize and melt all those guns. No, all Kinsella wants for him and his boy, McGuinty, is to do something, anything really, to be seen as doing something. That's the Liberal answer to everything, really. From Kyoto to gun control to drug policy the Liberals don't care what they do as long as they do something. When they "banned" 50% of the legally owned handguns in Canada in the early 90's you might be surprised to know they didn't really ban them so much as make them even more inconvenient for owners. They're still there, though, the evil small calibre and small size pistols sitting in safes across Canada waiting to be stolen by the gang bangers. They can't be sold except to other guys who own those guns but they can be inherited by children so they might never go away. Banning them was never about keeping them off the streets or preventing their theft by gangs. It was a publicity stunt at the expense of those who don't usually vote Liberal anyway.
You see, it was never about safety, it was about doing anything to be seen as doing something. The guns were banned but not seized and that gives the lie to Kinsella's new ban. The guns will still be there if he gets his way because he and his ilk don't have the guts to actually face the Canadian public and say they have spent ten billion dollars compensating gun owners for stealing their property and they don't have the guts to face gun owners and take their property without compensation. We might actually object to that and guess what? We have guns! No, it's all just a paper tiger in the name of "trying something new". Well, everything old is new again, I guess.
