Juno News - April 29, 2019


Hands off our guns, Toronto!

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
John Tory
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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

184.59

Word count

643

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Toronto Police Service is offering $350 to anyone who hands over their guns. Andrew Lutton explains why this is a bad idea, and why gun owners should not be participating in the buyback program. He also points out that gun ownership is not the problem, it's who owns them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Toronto Police want your guns!
00:00:05.000 Yes, thanks to an announcement by Toronto Mayor John Tory, the largest city in Canada has announced a gun buyback program
00:00:12.000 wherein if you have a handgun, the Toronto Police Service will visit your home, pick it up and give you $350 for your troubles
00:00:20.000 regardless of whether the gun is legally or illegally owned.
00:00:24.000 The whole point of this is for Toronto to say that it's trying to get illegal guns off the streets
00:00:29.000 but in reality, it's doing no such thing.
00:00:32.000 For starters, studies have shown on a number of occasions that gun buyback programs or gun amnesty programs
00:00:38.000 have zero impact when it comes to reducing gun crime or reducing crime more broadly.
00:00:45.000 And the reason for this is quite simple.
00:00:47.000 Number one, the price that's being offered, $350, is less than the value of most handguns,
00:00:53.000 certainly those used by gangsters, which means that if you want to sell your gun or offload it,
00:00:59.000 you can get more money by going through other means.
00:01:03.000 Secondly, the people that the government is supposedly targeting through these programs, gangsters,
00:01:08.000 have their guns for a reason, because they want them.
00:01:11.000 Now, the only people that surrender their guns for $350 under a gun buyback program
00:01:16.000 because John Tory told them to, are little old ladies whose late husband may have had a handgun kicking around
00:01:22.000 that they just haven't used or haven't needed.
00:01:24.000 These are the people that are going to be getting this money.
00:01:28.000 The whole program is an illusion.
00:01:30.000 The government wants to say that it's doing something about gun crime
00:01:33.000 and this is the way they're going to do it.
00:01:35.000 Although you can tell they're already pretty much not confident it's going to do anything
00:01:39.000 because John Tory is lowering expectations saying, no, no, no, don't worry.
00:01:43.000 This is just one small piece in a broader effort against gun crime.
00:01:47.000 Remember that last year Toronto had its homicide record.
00:01:51.000 This is even worse than the so-called year of the gun that precipitated the last gun buyback program
00:01:56.000 a little over a decade ago.
00:01:58.000 And the fact that here we are now suggests that this buyback really didn't change the fabric of organized crime in the city of Toronto.
00:02:05.000 There was another buyback program done about four or five years ago.
00:02:09.000 And again, here we are today.
00:02:12.000 The problem with this is that it once again indicates that the city's view, the government's view,
00:02:16.000 is that guns themselves are the problem.
00:02:18.000 If you can take a bunch of handguns from little old ladies who aren't using them 1.00
00:02:23.000 because there is a net negative number of firearms,
00:02:28.000 you've somehow managed to get crime guns off the streets.
00:02:32.000 And obviously it's flawed.
00:02:33.000 The problem with guns is who owns them, not the fact that they exist in the first place.
00:02:38.000 And the reason that I, as a gun owner, as a law-abiding gun owner who will not be participating in any such buyback,
00:02:44.000 get my back up against the wall about this is because this is ultimately the government trying to push the needle
00:02:50.000 to prove that anyone who owns a gun is the problem.
00:02:54.000 That if someone who's causing no harm to anyone hands over their gun, the city is a little bit safer.
00:02:59.000 That's not the truth because, well, my gun's not harming anyone right now,
00:03:03.000 which means me handing it over would cause nothing.
00:03:06.000 This is a gun grab.
00:03:08.000 And don't be mistaken, even though they're giving people $350,
00:03:12.000 not cash, it's a gift card if you've gone through the process and waited several weeks,
00:03:17.000 but just because they're giving it does not mean that the motivation is a pure one.
00:03:22.000 No, the motivation is to take guns, not off the streets, but out of homes.
00:03:27.000 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.