If there's one thing the United States is good at, according to the mainstream media, it's exporting problems. That's especially true when it comes to firearms. No matter where a gun turns up, if it can be linked to the United States in any way, it will be, and it will be chalked up to too few gun control laws here.
It's just the natural order of things, it seems.
And, once again, the New York Times has a whole story about the issue of American guns fueling crime in another country. This time, it's Canada.
Guns waving in the air, the partygoers danced inside a recording studio on a fashionable city block, near a bar with craft cocktails like “Espresso Yourself” and a boutique hotel with what a Michelin Guide called a “bohemian-baroque aesthetic.”
Then, just after midnight, three rival gang members descended on the alley behind the studio and began firing. The partygoers cracked a door and shot back wildly. Nearly 100 bullets tore into the night, many striking a nearby supermarket and homes.
It was a miracle no one was killed or injured, the police said. When the dust settled, officers recovered 16 guns tossed into trash bins, dumped in the alleyway and shoved under a couch — each one smuggled across the southern border, the police said.
“Within two days, we knew every single firearm that we’d seized that night was from the United States — which wasn’t surprising,” said Inspector Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police Service, adding that the guns had been trafficked north from Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.
American firearms are spilling increasingly into a country where gun control is far stricter than in the United States, according to government data and the authorities. Smugglers are hiding them inside commercial and personal vehicles, but are also loading them on drones, concealing them in boats or stashing them in a dead drop in a library straddling the border. Many guns then fetch up to eight times their original price on Canada’s black market.
The proliferation of illegal guns from the United States has fueled bloodshed in Canadian cities and even in remote northern communities. It has brought the kind of random gun violence rarely seen before, like the shootout last year at the studio in Toronto’s hip Queen Street West neighborhood.
Homicides have spiked in Canada in the past decade, most of them from guns.
That's fascinating.
That's roughly the same timeframe that Canada's been on an anti-gun jihad and trampling all over gun ownership in the Great White North.
Meanwhile, gun ownership is increasing. Concealed carry laws are now "may issue" whether states like it or not. There are more constitutional carry states than ever before. Nearly half of all Americans live under constitutional carry laws.
And our homicide rate is set to potentially hit a record low.
How is it that, if guns are the problem, the US is seeing a drop in the homicide rate while Canada, which has all but banned guns across the board, especially anything useful for either crime or self-defense, is seeing an increase?
Weird, right?
Yet somehow, all those guns are our responsibility. It can't have anything to do with handgun and "assault weapon" bans. Oh no, that can't be the issue. It has to be the lack of American gun laws.
I swear, I'm absolutely sick of this idea that pro-gun regions somehow owe it to anti-gun regions to adopt their laws simply because their laws aren't worth a damn and they want to blame the pro-gun places. Whether it's Chicago or California blaming the red states, or it's Canada or Mexico blaming the United States, it's pathetic all on its own.
And the media jumping in without any critical thinking doesn't help in the least.
Editor's Note: Christmas is coming a little early here at Bearing Arms!
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