On top of the sorrow I feel for the loss of life in Montreal, I also feel awful for Canadian gun rights supporters. They did nothing wrong, but the shooting in Montreal is likely to lead to additional gun control that they don't need and most certainly don't deserve.
Anti-gunners have never been happy that the SKS continues to be legal in the country, even though here, it's not even considered an "assault weapon" in even the most gun-controlled states. It's got a fixed magazine (most models, anyway), fires a not particularly powerful round, and doesn't have any of the features typically associated with modern sporting rifles.
Hell, at one time, it was a popular starting gun for hunters because it carried a beefy enough round for deer, was cheap, and was legal almost everywhere. I've got a couple of them myself, including a Vietnam bringback that my father acquired and gave to my late Uncle, before it passed to me.
The calls for gun control have started, unfortunately, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has joined the chorus, calling for a "multifaceted approach" to gun restrictions.
Carney says they'll be talking with subject matter experts, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to determine if the SKS should get banned. Considering who these experts are likely to be, even among the RCMP folks, I think it's clear what will happen.
That's never been in doubt.
It's also the wrong way for Canada to head.
The SKS is no more dangerous than any other firearm. While it's semi-automatic, so are the pistol-caliber carbines that are still apparently legal up there. The M1 Garand is also still legal, and while it only has an eight-round capacity, it's also a more powerful round.
The modern Browning BAR--not the awesome one from World War II--accepts detachable magazines, which means that if someone gets a 10-round magazine for it and be just as deadly as with the SKS, if not more so.
Obviously, some will answer that this is grounds to ban these firearms, too, but think about something for a second. This killer used an SKS, which has been a target of Canadian gun grabbers for a while now. He didn't use any of these guns, which seem to also be just as legal. Why?
Most would-be killers aren't gun people. They don't really follow guns, and they don't study them. They don't really seem to do a lot of research about what gun they should use, either, from what I can tell. Instead, they tend to use whatever the media has been going on about.
The AR-15 became more common at mass killings in the United States after the media kept beating the drum about just how dangerous they were and why they couldn't be trusted to mere civilians. So-called ghost guns didn't become a thing with criminals until politicians and the media started freaking out about them.
Here, they freaked about the SKS, so the killer figured that was the best choice.
Banning it won't make people safer. At best, it'll push future killers to pick something else. Even if you ban everything, there will still be a way for them to get something, and they'll use it.
The problem isn't that Canada hasn't gone far enough on guns. The problem is that, like so many other politicians, the focus is so exclusively on guns that they ignore the deeper problems that create these killers in the first place.
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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