Tuesday 11 January 2011

Gun Control is Also a Women's Issue





The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.

~P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays from Hell, 1989

This post was originally published on another of my
blogs on Oct. 9, 2009. I rerun it here in recognition of the tragic shootings in Arizona, where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords lies in intensive care, in a medically induced coma. The alleged shooter sounds Jared Loughren sounds, not to put too fine a point on it, like a nutbar. He wasn't acceptable to military recruiters, he was exiled from the classroom for his erratic speech and behaviour. But hey buddy, wanna buy a semiautomatic Glock with an extended magazine? No problem!

Who can't help but conclude that the ease of procuring guns--in the USA in general and Arizona in particular--is partly responsible for this incident, leaving 6 dead so far and 14 injured? There are some
300 million guns in the USA, a third of them handguns. One hundred million guns are in private hands, the highest level of gun ownership in the world. Is it any wonder it is also accompanied by the highest rate of firearm homicide of any industrialized country? Those who believe MORE guns would make the country safer are, you should pardon the expression, off their rockers.

Do you really think another person whipping a gun out in the midst of the Loughner melee would have resulted in FEWER casualties? Only in a Vin Diesel movie...


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Some 80 per cent of Canada's guns--numbering between 9 and 11 million, by various estimates--are owned by men, so perhaps by definition, gun control can be seen as a "woman's issue." And repeated polling shows a substantial majority of women support the gun registry, perhaps because we know that guns are often used to harm or intimidate women in the throes of domestic violence. Women around the world are at greatest risk of harm from their intimate partners—“the usual suspects” in such cases.

Fully 85 per cent of Canadian women who are murdered are killed by their spouse or partner, and most of those shot dead are killed with legally owned firearms.
Despite pro-gun lobby bluster, this gun violence is not just an urban phenomenon — the rate of women killed with guns is higher in rural areas because rural people own more guns. And murder is just the tip of the domestic violence iceberg—for every woman killed, many more are injured or threatened. And these “domestic violence” incidents appear in the papers almost daily. Several recent examples:

Smith AB, July 30th: Ian Jeffrey Paget kills estranged wife Joan Hanson, her daughter and granddaughter, and then turns the rifle on himself at her rural home in northern Alberta.


Kitchener ON, August 11th: Nadia Gehl is shot in early February at a bus stop close to her home. Waterloo police finally apprehend three suspects: her husband and two of his friends.


Orangeville ON, September 13th: Police investigate a murder-suicide that left a mother of two and her estranged husband dead. Witnesses say 39-year-old Heidi Ferguson, shot in the chest, sought help at a neighbour's. As she lay dying, Ferguson reportedly cried, "I've been shot by my husband ... please help me." An avid hunter and gun collector, Hugh Ferguson turned the gun on himself after a standoff with police.


Winnipeg MB, September 17th: Police are called after a 19-year-old woman is allegedly assaulted and threatened with a firearm. The woman flees the house and calls police from another area residence.


Fort St. John BC, September 30th: A northeastern B.C. man is shot and killed by the RCMP after a five-day standoff that began when the 41-year-old farm resident pursued a van carrying his wife, an unspecified number of children and a friend, and shot out the front tires.


Since the gun registry was created, close to 23,000 firearms licenses have been refused or revoked because of safety concerns. We register our cars and our dogs--not to register our guns would be criminal. No matter what the gun lobby says, gun control works. Consider the following :

· Controls on rifles and shotguns were strengthened in 1991: that year 1441 Canadians were killed with guns. By 2005, such deaths dropped by almost half, to 818.


· The number of Canadian women murdered with guns fell from 85 in 1991 to 32 in 2005. But the number of women murdered by weapons other than firearms declined only slightly during the same period of time. Again, the effectiveness of gun control is inescapable.

My son was at Dawson College on September 13, 2006 when Kimveer Gill went on his murderous rampage. I will never understand why Mr. Gill had such easy access to such enormous firepower--the fact that he managed to kill “only” a single young woman was due to the fortuitous coincidental presence of two brave and well-trained police officers. (I say “only” because, of course, for her parents, family and friends, the murder of 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa is no small loss.) Kimveer Gill didn't need those guns and he shouldn't have had them. Why should his right to feel "big and bad" have trumped Ms. De Sousa’s, my son's, or anyone else’s safety? And so I support more gun control, not less. Please don’t let our Parliament send Bill C-391, the bill to dismantle the long-gun registry, to committee, the next step in the legislative process.

Though our Prime Minister may refuse to face it, rifles and shotguns are the firearms used most often to threaten women and children, and the weapons of choice in the murder of police officers. Look, for example, at the 4 Mounties killed in Mayerthorpe, AB. And the only charges levied in that case were against the gun providers, who were traceable only because of the gun registry! When Mr. Harper talks about law and order one day, and laxer gun control the next, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Contact your MP on this issue. Don't let Mr. Harper play fast and loose with our children's lives.

4 comments:

  1. Yep, laws do a great job of stopping criminals from committing crimes. That's why you can't get cocaine, marijuana, or illegal handguns anywhere in this country!

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  2. so i guess you'd be in favour of repealing the laws against murder...since people commit the crime, despite the laws against it?

    your logic leaves something to be desired.

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  3. May be you should stop and look at the whole picture guns are a tool in which I own many , not one has ever got down off the rack loaded it self and shot someone you do not need to control the gun you need to persons , I have never knowen anywhere that gun control has worked , maybe you should consider better self defence for women , I have a wife and 7 children and of those 7 , 5 are girls all own firearms and all have had training in thier use , do you think some nut job wants to try and rape , or beat you when her or she might face that kind of deterent its time people started to wake up we live in a world where good people get hurt its time to protect them and put them on even footing with the bad guys
    and with all this mumble jumble you want done to protect women just takes the gun out of good hands and leaves it in the bad ones take a look any where in the world you like that has gun control.

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  4. No, I'd be in favor of liberals finally admitting that you cannot legislate criminals or their behavior away. If gun bans worked, then logically there would be no murders or shootings in places where such bans existed. But I'm pretty sure that New York, D.C., and Columbia have their fair share.

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