Full Comment - Justin Trudeau is ‘gaslighting law-abiding gun owners’

00:00:00.000 Hello, I'm Anthony Fury. Thanks so much for joining us for the latest episode of Full

00:00:09.100 Comet. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing.

00:00:12.760 What's the situation with gun crime in Canada and Canada's firearms legislation today? And

00:00:19.720 how does it compare to what's going on in the United States? Invariably, it seems that

00:00:25.120 whenever a big shooting happens, a mass shooting in a school, at a religious facility, wherever

00:00:30.560 it happens in the United States, and they talk about guns, gun culture, gun laws, gun

00:00:35.980 crime, of course. But then we mimic them and we do the same up here. We piggyback on our

00:00:42.660 conversation. Does that make sense? And in what environment are we having those conversations?

00:00:48.900 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau certainly thinks it makes sense because right after the Uvalde,

00:00:53.180 Texas school shooting, he brought in proposed legislation surrounding gun laws. He says we

00:00:59.560 need it in Canada because it would reduce gun crime and save lives. But will it? What do

00:01:06.120 we need to do in Canada to deal with prospective gun crime? Our guest today is one of the country's 0.88

00:01:12.620 top experts on firearms legislation in Canada. Gary Mauser is Professor Emeritus at the Beattie

00:01:18.180 School of Business and Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies at Simon Fraser University.

00:01:24.160 He joins us now. Professor Mauser, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us.

00:01:28.460 Thank you for having me.

00:01:30.060 How would you describe the situation in the United States when it comes to gun laws and gun

00:01:36.040 culture compared to how it is here in Canada? What are the right ways to compare and contrast?

00:01:41.260 Well, first of all, in Canada, firearms are very heavily regulated. There is no constitutional right

00:01:52.160 to own a firearm to protect yourself or your family. There's no right to own a firearm or any weapon for

00:02:01.120 that matter. In the United States, which is still suffering from the problems of slavery over 150 years ago,

00:02:10.980 there is intense problems with gang crime, criminal violence out of control. And we don't just don't have

00:02:19.400 that kind of problem in Canada. We do have basically the same patterns of criminal violence. For example,

00:02:30.140 most of the homicides in both Canada and the US are driven by criminals who are hurting, attacking,

00:02:38.980 killing other criminals. That's true in both countries. Second kind of pattern that's similar

00:02:45.600 is domestic violence, where drunken, drugged, angry people hurt their spouses. Again, most of these are

00:02:56.240 people with criminal records, both accused and victims. So there are similarities and differences.

00:03:02.860 So what's interesting is the situations you describe are generally not the scenarios that provoke

00:03:10.720 the national conversations about gun control. The gang nine shootings, where we hear statistics out of

00:03:17.700 a city like Detroit or Chicago, where they had this number of shootings or murders on this particular

00:03:22.840 weekend. What sparks the national conversations are when someone goes into a school and kills a dozen

00:03:29.880 people, when they go into a church, a mosque, a synagogue, and they do a shooting. Those are the events

00:03:36.540 that I think end up spurring these conversations.

00:03:40.380 Exactly right. It should be no surprise that media reports do not reflect reality. Media, of course,

00:03:49.160 thrives on excitement, on the unexpected, the bizarre. And so, of course, that is what drives the crime

00:03:57.420 debate. Mass shootings, particularly mass public shootings in or out of schools, constitute something

00:04:05.220 like 5% of all the shootings, I mean, murders in the United States, and 2% in Canada. So these are

00:04:15.380 clearly very small amounts of activities. On the other hand, they demand the headlines. And part of the

00:04:26.060 reason I think that gun control comes up in response to these rare events is that underlying the event

00:04:36.240 is police and administrative incompetence in both Canada and the United States. And that, of course,

00:04:43.020 is not something the government would like widely known.

00:04:47.060 I'd like to tease that out a bit more in detail in a few moments. But back to what you were saying

00:04:51.260 about the statistics, I don't think people would be surprised to hear, well, okay, the shooting

00:04:56.100 deaths, the majority of them are the gangland murders or what have you. And okay, school shootings

00:05:00.240 are only 5% of all numbers, but we want to eliminate that 5%. We want to do what we can to get those

00:05:06.440 numbers to pretty much zero because, okay, these gang guys, all right, live by the sword, die by the

00:05:11.520 sword. We wish it wasn't happening, but we kind of know why it was. The school shootings, none of them

00:05:16.040 should be happening full stop, which is, I think, what animates people to say, we got to do something

00:05:21.180 to get rid of these. And well, you know, guns are involved in these crimes, obviously, and guns are

00:05:25.460 things that are regulated. So let's look at this as a pathway to get out of this.

00:05:29.380 That's a very frequent scenario. But if you remember, there was a insane person who drove a

00:05:39.720 truck down through a crowded Toronto street. There was an angry, insane fellow in Minnesota,

00:05:48.280 who drove an SUV through a packed party. There were people who set fire to crowded theaters and

00:05:56.340 crowded bars. There's lots of ways to do mass public killing besides guns. One of the problems,

00:06:04.980 of course, is that when people say, my goodness, we should do something, immediately partisan

00:06:12.260 differences show up as to what should that something be. And so both in the US and in Canada,

00:06:19.180 there are battles between policymakers and politicians trying to figure out what is the

00:06:26.900 option that will get a majority. And that's, that's often stymied, again, in the United States,

00:06:35.820 more than Canada. But essentially, there's a partisan battle and that squashes action.

00:06:44.300 What should be done then in the United States when it comes to these mass shootings? I mean,

00:06:49.460 there's, there's always the feeling, we got to do something here. And one can certainly appreciate

00:06:53.400 that. I mean, a bunch of children were just killed. And it's natural for human beings to say,

00:06:57.180 we got to do something to prevent this from happening again.

00:07:02.240 Well, for example, in the recent Texas school shooting, the Democrats come out and, and say

00:07:10.320 that we should ban guns, we should ban this kind of gun, ban that type of gun. And the Republicans say,

00:07:16.460 well, we should train school personnel so that they could be able to defend themselves to know what's

00:07:25.120 going on. If the police, as demonstrated in this Texas shooting, do not act properly, do not know

00:07:33.120 what to do, then certainly we should have that's certainly that is a clear example that we should

00:07:41.300 train the teachers better, train the citizens better. In fact, the citizens were making efforts

00:07:47.440 to rescue their kids, to stop the shooting, and the police hindered them. So, again, we get these two

00:07:55.160 policy efforts, some kind of gun ban versus some kind of arming the citizens or arming teachers. And as you

00:08:02.000 can see, those are intense partisan differences.

00:08:04.880 Professor, I'm interested in your thoughts as to why we have different gun cultures right now in 1.00

00:08:11.540 terms of persons in the United States, it seems generally troubled young men, who believe that

00:08:18.740 this is a thing they should do as a solution to their woes. I remember the late colonist Walter

00:08:24.980 Williams, an economist as well. I vividly remember some stories that he wrote about how in the 1950s,

00:08:31.240 I believe, when he was in junior high or high school, they were all assigned rifles. And I think

00:08:36.220 the rules were, and they did shooting practice like at lunchtime or after school or something

00:08:39.780 like that. And the rule was basically put this in your locker. I don't want to see you monkeying

00:08:44.000 around with these guns and I don't make sure they're not loaded when they're locked or something

00:08:47.380 like that. I don't even know if the locker had locks on it and nobody ever shot anybody. So

00:08:51.820 basically you had these pubescent boys who were assigned firearms by the state or by the school

00:08:57.740 and they didn't shoot each other. Now I appreciate they're not these high octane automatic weapons,

00:09:03.620 but still they didn't even, I'm sure there's one or two incidents, but they didn't have major

00:09:07.520 problems. And Walter Williams, I guess, was giving this story to say, there's just something different

00:09:11.360 in the culture now as well, where young men are saying, this is something I'm going to do.

00:09:16.560 What's going on there?

00:09:18.200 I think you put your finger on it. The problem is troubled young men and the community culture in

00:09:25.700 which they grew up. It had to exist, of course, in both countries, Canada and the US. The question

00:09:33.720 is, how do you deal with troubled young men? What creates the troubles that these young men find

00:09:41.220 themselves immersed in? And what can we do about it? I mean, look around at our economy. We have

00:09:47.460 common two income earning people in a family. They abandon their children all day. The state,

00:09:55.680 the school runs the parenting that the parents no longer supply. We have a huge number of immigrants

00:10:04.680 who just arrive in our country and aren't given adequate services or introductions. So it's no

00:10:11.320 surprised that we have troubled youngsters, both in the US and Canada. And so the question is,

00:10:17.600 how can we solve this problem? And that is much more difficult than having some simplistic idea

00:10:23.420 of banning left-handed guns or big ones or little ones or pink ones or whatever.

00:10:29.380 Would it be even possible in the US to do something serious about banning guns,

00:10:34.740 even if you really wanted to, just because of how many there are? I mean, there's just so many

00:10:39.520 firearms all throughout the United States. No, I think you're right. It would be impossible to ban

00:10:46.440 it, not only because of the numbers, but because of the gun culture and also the constitution,

00:10:52.940 which Americans, unlike Canadians, take their constitution seriously. Americans have the right

00:10:59.280 to own guns, to defend themselves and their family or their political rights. This is something

00:11:05.640 that is unique to the United States. So if there was a determined effort by any state or national

00:11:13.420 authority to ban and confiscate guns, the public would react and not allow it. It would not happen.

00:11:23.820 We'll be back with more full comment with Gary Mauser in just a moment.

00:11:28.560 Professor Mauser, we were talking about the high volume of firearms that are in the United States,

00:11:33.940 but I think one thing that might surprise Canadians, and it surprised me when I finally learned about

00:11:39.220 the data, is there are a lot of people in Canada who do have gun licenses. Something like over 2

00:11:44.960 million men and women are licensed firearms owners. That's right. 2.2 million Canadians have licenses

00:11:53.500 to own firearms, and that's more than people who are active playing golf or even active playing hockey.

00:12:00.800 And that's an underestimate. Angus Reid did two national polls, and while the details are hidden in the

00:12:12.320 demographic pages, not up front, he found 4 million Canadians admit to owning a firearm.

00:12:20.280 Oh, would that be licensed then? Like the 2.2 million number is an estimation, and then 4 million,

00:12:29.280 some of those people... 2.2 million, I'm sorry, 2.2 million is the number of licenses registered with

00:12:36.160 the RCMP. 4 million is the estimate in public opinion polls.

00:12:41.200 So would the difference there be people who have firearms illegally, or people who are licensed but

00:12:48.860 just haven't showed up in those tallies?

00:12:50.540 It's illegal. It's illegal to have a firearm and not have a firearms license to have it. However,

00:13:01.360 there's an ambiguity in what having a firearm means. It is perfectly reasonable for a family

00:13:09.060 to have one licensed firearm owner, but everybody in the family have access to it, to say, to shoot

00:13:17.460 pests on the cops or to have access in case their house is attacked by a bear or a thug or something.

00:13:27.700 So some people might think they have a firearm when in fact they have illegal access to it,

00:13:34.060 but it's not, strictly speaking, all that legal.

00:13:38.840 And of these millions of people with firearms, what types of firearms would you say they have by and large?

00:13:45.340 Almost all of these firearms are long guns, that is to say rifles or shotguns, and almost all of them

00:13:56.340 are used for hunting or pest protection in rural areas. About a quarter of the firearms in Canada

00:14:06.360 are semi-automatic, which means one trigger pull, one shot, and then the gun self-loads.

00:14:14.340 So another trigger pull, another shot, as opposed to some other kind of action.

00:14:20.440 What is the annual number of gun crimes in Canada? Someone getting injured or killed because of a

00:14:26.940 firearm, whether it's illegal or an illegal one. I'm sure we'll talk about that data next in a moment.

00:14:32.200 It's roughly 3% of all violent crimes have a gun somewhere close.

00:14:40.040 And about 1% of all violent crime, a gun is used to injure somebody.

00:14:46.720 And there's a couple of hundred thousand violent crimes each year.

00:14:52.600 I don't have their number off the top of my head.

00:14:55.740 And then I know we have subsequent statistics that have come out, I believe, from the RCMP

00:14:59.400 talking about how of those numbers, an even smaller percentage of that, a much smaller percentage

00:15:06.220 is legally owned and licensed firearms. Is that correct?

00:15:10.760 That's correct. I've submitted two separate special requests to Stats Canada to find out

00:15:17.940 how many accused murderers have a firearms license.

00:15:22.320 And what I've found is that the firearms homicide rate for PAL holders, firearms license holders,

00:15:31.400 is about one-third the Canadian homicide rate.

00:15:35.940 In other words, about 12 licensed firearms owners each year are accused of murder out of the 2.2 million.

00:15:44.640 So that means that licensed firearms owners are statistically less likely to be involved in a gun crime?

00:15:53.080 That's right.

00:15:54.140 That's a really interesting statistic.

00:15:56.440 And if you look at the police and border authorities, they admit, often you have to push them,

00:16:05.040 but they admit that the crimes with guns are committed with illegally held guns.

00:16:10.160 And that most of these illegally held guns, 86%, according to two or three Toronto police chiefs in subsequent years,

00:16:21.540 86% are smuggled in from the states.

00:16:24.840 So this brings us to the political angle, the legislation angle.

00:16:29.400 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in the wake of the Texas school tragedy, announces Bill C-21,

00:16:34.520 which proposes a number of things, one of which is to put a freeze on licensed gun owners

00:16:39.660 from being able to purchase new handguns.

00:16:42.700 What are your thoughts on this legislation?

00:16:45.120 Well, this is a very interesting, if cynical, political trick.

00:16:50.080 The Prime Minister is playing on the general ignorance of his supporters,

00:16:57.840 and he is essentially gaslighting law-abiding gun owners.

00:17:04.540 And he knows this is not going to work, but it will galvanize his supporters.

00:17:13.420 And he hopes to prod the conservatives into defending law-abiding gun owners,

00:17:19.120 which he hopes will, again, galvanize his supporters.

00:17:24.240 And what I find so interesting is, simultaneous to Bill C-21 being introduced,

00:17:28.680 there's another piece of legislation winding its way through Parliament called Bill C-5,

00:17:32.620 which actually decreases the punishments that people will face for gun crimes.

00:17:38.540 That's right.

00:17:39.480 That's right.

00:17:40.180 C-5 reduces not only the minimum crime time that one could charge for a violent offender,

00:17:48.360 but for gun crimes and even smuggling crimes.

00:17:52.060 Yeah, I understand that there was a mandatory minimum for three years

00:17:56.360 for somebody who has been convicted of either gun smuggling or selling illegal guns.

00:18:01.180 Now, I appreciate that there's a legal debate as to whether or not mandatory minimums are appropriate at all

00:18:05.900 and whether or not it should entirely be judicial discretion,

00:18:08.620 but I do think, okay, three years, and then we know actually it's not a full three years served

00:18:13.400 because of how the system works, so it's probably two years or a year and a half or whatever.

00:18:17.800 And one goes, well, if we really are that horrified by gun crimes,

00:18:21.280 and if we are acknowledging that illegal guns is a problem and gun smuggling is a problem,

00:18:24.960 like, why are we lessening the sentences?

00:18:28.620 Well, this is part of progressive dogma that if someone non-white is accused of a crime,

00:18:37.180 it must be somebody else's fault that it's colonialism, it's racism,

00:18:43.900 and of course only white people can be racist, or it is the system's fault,

00:18:49.240 and therefore, if there is a disparity in the number of accusations made against people of color,

00:18:59.940 then they must be excused, and that means, practically speaking, bail conditions are minimized,

00:19:08.580 and sentences are reduced or not acted upon.

00:19:13.260 I know the Prime Minister has cited over-representation of some demographics as a justification for all of this.

00:19:20.900 I also know statistics do indicate that, for instance, First Nations persons who are charged with murder,

00:19:26.700 primarily the majority of victims are First Nations persons who are victims.

00:19:31.100 So one thing, you're lessening crimes for, okay, charges against a First Nations person,

00:19:36.000 but you're also lessening the punishment someone receives for murdering a First Nations person.

00:19:41.160 Well, there is a problem with prisons and punishment for any race, for any ethnicity.

00:19:50.180 People who go into prison rarely come out for the better.

00:19:54.300 If prison is supposed to rehabilitate, supposed to rescue a troubled soul, then that's not working.

00:20:03.040 So this general problem is certainly true for Aboriginal people, for new immigrants to Canada. 0.77

00:20:12.760 It also is a problem for anybody else as well.

00:20:16.100 The problem is in the prisons and how they operate.

00:20:19.420 The problem is how one deals with people who are violent,

00:20:23.760 just eliminating sentences on the argument that if they go in, they come out worse and they must come out at some point.

00:20:32.800 That's short-sighted thinking because victims who are outside suffer from having violent criminals come back to them.

00:20:40.980 Professor Mouser, I want to get your thoughts more on the border problem because I do think that a lot of the responses to Bill C-21 have been people rolling their eyes.

00:20:50.200 And I don't just mean people who have been long familiar with the gun statistics or people who are firearms owners themselves,

00:20:56.020 but even from to sort of stereotype like the downtown elites who don't know firearms owners,

00:21:02.700 but they now know, come on, they're all coming across the border.

00:21:06.380 That's where these guns are from, the illegal firearms.

00:21:09.000 That's the ones being used in crime because people have been saying this fact for years now.

00:21:13.320 And I think people who are not even a part of the gun community have internalized it.

00:21:17.840 So I think we've established for many people, yes, the border is a problem.

00:21:22.700 I don't hear much discussion of what the granular details are, though, to stop this.

00:21:29.360 What do you think are some of the things that should be done to put a pause on illegal firearms coming into Canada?

00:21:35.920 Do we just need to get more CBSA officers opening the trunks of various vehicles?

00:21:41.120 No, I don't think so.

00:21:42.480 I think it's much more widespread than that. 0.62

00:21:47.560 Most of the captures that the border people catch now are ignorant, innocent Americans who are used to carrying their guns across state lines,

00:21:58.420 but think that going into Canada is no different.

00:22:02.160 And so they capture these basically responsible people who may have the permit from their state that they come from,

00:22:10.220 but not the Canadian permit.

00:22:11.620 What needs to be done is vastly improve the border security.

00:22:17.780 At the recent House of Commons Security Committee, the border peoples spoke up and said that trains and shipment manifests need to be checked much better.

00:22:33.040 There are now virtually no inspection of incoming shipments by train.

00:22:41.620 Most, I mean, first of all, the border is billions of dollars coming across it every day.

00:22:48.860 And we need some kind of sophisticated effort to screen these because obviously one can't do more than random sample in a thorough way.

00:22:59.400 So manifests need to be checked much more thoroughly than what they are now.

00:23:06.720 This costs money.

00:23:07.700 This involves training.

00:23:08.860 And second, we need to focus the police on what is needed, train the police, and the police need to understand that the law-abiding licensed Canadian gun owners are a resource, are an asset and not a problem.

00:23:28.160 So if the top brass focuses their direction in the right way, then these problems could be solved.

00:23:36.500 So by way of example, you're saying that basically how so many illegal firearms are getting into Canada is that somebody will get a box marked computer parts or kids' toys, but the box is actually full of guns.

00:23:47.880 And you get a shipping company to take it across in a truck, and it's with a bunch of other goods that are perhaps legal goods and as legitimately labeled.

00:23:55.360 And then there you go.

00:23:56.440 That's how it enters, and we don't open every box.

00:23:58.460 That's correct, and remember, Canada has a huge problem with illegal drugs.

00:24:05.340 That too is, for the most part, smuggled across the border, and we can't stop that either.

00:24:10.280 So whether we in fact can eliminate smuggled guns is probably not possible, but we certainly can do a better job.

00:24:18.860 And there's also the other end, why don't we keep the criminals that we catch with smuggled guns, put them in jail?

00:24:29.120 Why don't we keep them in jail? 1.00

00:24:30.800 The typical anti-racism effort is to bounce them back on the streets and not put them in jail at all.

00:24:39.640 So there's no punishment for having or using an illegal gun.

00:24:44.620 Are we doing enough investigative work to track backwards from where the gun came from?

00:24:50.320 So we've got the criminal who has the illegal gun, and presumably quite a few.

00:24:55.080 We go, okay, where did you get this gun from?

00:24:56.940 And I appreciate they may not answer the question when you first asked them, but surely there were policing mechanisms to trace back.

00:25:03.440 You're not stopping it at the border on the truck shipment, but the guy's got it.

00:25:07.240 How did you get it in here?

00:25:08.840 Is not enough effort being put into that?

00:25:12.380 That's true.

00:25:13.020 We don't trace a large enough percentage of the gun.

00:25:18.440 Some are pretty obvious, and some are traced, but the police trace only if it is necessary for making a conviction.

00:25:29.100 They're not paid to be StatsCan researchers.

00:25:32.480 So this is expensive, time-consuming, and they have other things to do that are more immediately useful.

00:25:39.840 So the budget has to go up, the emphasis has to go up, and this is indeed a more complex problem.

00:25:48.120 But why should the police do any tracing if the courts are going to let the malefactor out immediately? 1.00

00:25:55.260 Hold on, though.

00:25:55.860 Well, I assume that there was some unit, operation, division of people who were fully seconded into looking into this, but you're just saying, no, it's crime by crime.

00:26:04.820 This person's convicted of a charge with murder.

00:26:07.660 Here's their firearm.

00:26:08.660 But there's no real unit that's solely dedicated to dealing with this?

00:26:13.340 It's not quite as organized as you think, although you're right in saying that various, not all police departments have some of these organizations that are dedicated to this.

00:26:26.620 But again, it's very small.

00:26:28.960 It's not sufficient.

00:26:29.980 It's underfunded.

00:26:32.100 The RCMP puts nowhere near the required amount of money or expertise into this.

00:26:38.820 Professor, where do you think firearms legislation is headed in Canada now, given that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has the backing of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who appears to support this legislation?

00:26:48.780 Regardless of whether or not these sorts of bills do reduce gun crime in Canada, it seems like there's appetite to just further restrict, ban, limit firearms in this country.

00:26:59.700 Well, I think you're right.

00:27:00.720 With a de facto majority in Parliament, the Trudeau Liberals can pass and enforce whatever legislation they wish, whether it's effective, whether it's wise, is irrelevant.

00:27:12.320 And therefore, all handguns will be frozen.

00:27:19.580 And the only possible way to change this would be for a new government to be elected, replace the Trudeau Liberals, and pass different legislation nullifying this.

00:27:32.720 I think more and more people in Canada, gun owners or not, are seeing with their own eyes that the government is gaslighting various people and not actually passing legislation that will be effective.

00:27:53.100 Whether people live in big cities or rural Canada, people realize that hunters, smart shooters, honest, law-abiding people are not the problem.

00:28:05.360 Professor Gary Mauser, thanks so much for joining us today with your insights. Much appreciated.

00:28:09.620 Thank you very much for having me.

00:28:11.840 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:28:14.140 I'm Anthony Fury.

00:28:15.260 This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:28:19.240 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

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Full Comment - June 13, 2022

Justin Trudeau is ‘gaslighting law-abiding gun owners’

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