A 35-year-old man has pleaded guilty to smuggling 67 handguns across the border from the United States into Canada. This story is unfortunate, but it tells us what we should already know: that with the longest unprotected border in the world, and quite frankly, people that go across for a number of reasons many times, our threat when it comes to illegal guns in Canada comes not from domestic guns owned by legal and licensed gun owners like myself, but from the illegal gun trade. Yet still, politicians and police try to put the blame elsewhere, which serves no other purpose than to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
00:00:00.000A 35-year-old man has pleaded guilty to smuggling 67 handguns across the border from the United States into Canada.
00:00:08.480Randy Jackson, no not the American Idol Randy Jackson, was a combat veteran, an upstanding citizen,
00:00:14.360so much so that he could get a Nexus card which allowed him to travel across the border with ease.
00:00:19.640He was from Michigan, served a couple of tours in Kuwait, and had a family in London, Ontario.
00:00:25.220So, he didn't trip any radars when he was going across the border, even though he was bringing with him over the course of a couple of years, dozens of illegal guns.
00:00:34.640Guns that were in fact used in crime, recovered in many cases by police in Toronto.
00:00:40.880This story is unfortunate, but it tells us what we should already know, that with the longest unprotected border in the world,
00:00:47.120and quite frankly, people that go across for any number of reasons many times,
00:00:51.720our threat when it comes to illegal guns in Canada comes not from domestic guns owned by legal and licensed gun owners like myself,
00:01:00.340but from the illegal gun trade, the black market.
00:01:04.340Yet still, politicians and police try to put the blame elsewhere,
00:01:08.260which serves no other purpose than to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
00:01:12.600The fact is, the Canadian government publishes no nationwide data on the origins of guns used in crime.
00:01:19.060The only data that do exist come from a few isolated reports by local police departments,
00:01:24.820and these have proven themselves time and time again to be immensely flawed.
00:01:29.260For example, the Toronto Police released a now infamous memo saying that about half of the guns used in crime were sourced domestically,
00:01:36.760which means they supposedly came from a legal gun owner who decided to sell their gun illegally to make a quick buck.
00:01:43.180Even though the story was phony and debunked very easily,
00:01:47.740the media ran with it and still has not corrected the record.
00:01:51.660Well, let's look at what was so flawed with that.
00:01:54.62035% of what the Toronto Police classed as crime guns, according to their own report,
00:02:00.280weren't actually firearms under the law.
00:02:02.900So one-third of the guns that they were talking about wouldn't even qualify as actual guns.
00:02:08.500More importantly, the definition of what they considered a crime gun was far too broad to be of any significance.
00:02:15.240If they busted you for something that had nothing to do with firearms but found a gun in your home,
00:02:20.520that was classed as a crime gun, as one notable example.
00:02:24.760And the worst part was that they assumed anything they couldn't trace to be domestic.
00:02:29.780And this was pointed out by activist Dennis Young using data he found himself through an access to information request.
00:02:36.020I would love for the Canadian government to be more transparent here,
00:02:39.500but quite frankly, the best data we have come from the American agency, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.