Canada has a national-level red flag law. They can swoop in and take guns from people who are reported to be a danger to themselves or others. Well, probably mostly others, since they're pretty quick to let people who want to kill themselves not only do it, but do it on the government's dime.
Still, they have the law in place.
The problem, at least so far as some are concerned, is that they have no idea how effective the law actually is.
Well, that would be fair, except guess what metrics they think should be used.
"Red flag" orders were billed as a faster, simpler way to keep Canadian communities safe by temporarily removing legal firearms from the hands of those who might do themselves — or others — harm. They were part of a suite of gun control measures introduced in the wake of 2020's Portapique, N.S., mass shooting, the deadliest in the country's history.
But more than two years after the orders finally became federal law, it's unclear if they are working as designed — because no one appears to be keeping track of when, where or how often they are being implemented.
Following the February tragedy in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., where a shooter killed eight victims and then herself, CBC News sought details about the use of red flag orders across Canada. (The RCMP has said that several firearms were seized from the shooter's family home under red flag provisions, but later returned after their legal owner went to court.)
The country's 11 provincial and territorial chief firearms officers — in charge of issuing and revoking gun licences — said they have no data on such seizures. So too did the Ontario Provincial Police, Sûreté du Québec and the federal Public Safety ministry.
The problem here is that simply issuing orders isn't evidence of their effectiveness. It's simply evidence of their use, and that's a very different thing.
Red flag orders get issued because someone is concerned about another. They don't take the time to evaluate the validity of those concerns, which means a ton of people who would never hurt a fly see their guns taken away by the government simply because of a third party freaking out.
Meanwhile, the Tumbler Ridge killer, who had a long history of troubling activity, still carried out his awful attack and killed his mother and brother, probably to gain access to Mom's guns.
So, how much good did it do there?
"They've got to get it right all of the time when the bad guys just have to get it right once," someone might argue, which would be valid if they were actually getting it right the rest of the time. There's no evidence of that, though, because there can't be. The fact that people are getting their guns returned at all tells us that at least some of these people getting caught up in this fiasco weren't a threat.
Canada isn't tracking how often these are issued, but that's probably for the best, considering those numbers aren't about effectiveness, just use.
By that same metric, snake oil remedies that are little more than water, but happen to sell well, must be effective too, right?
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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