In the wake of the Texas school shooting, the gun control debate between Canada and the United States has reached a new level of intensity. Gun control is a hot-button issue in both countries, and Canada's gun control laws have been cracking down hard in response to a mass shooting that took place in a public school in Texas. What do we need to do to prevent mass shootings like this from happening in the future? How can we prevent them in the first place, and what can we do about it?
00:00:00.000Part of why I really wanted to get you on is because we've got, I mean, when the United States, something happens there, it ripples over into Canada.
00:00:05.900I mean, we've got some differences. We've got some cultural differences, legislative ones, but still we share our issues.
00:00:12.480And the big debate on both countries right now is firearm control.
00:00:17.380That always happens whenever there's a terrible tragedy, as there was in Texas.
00:00:22.140Down there, you guys are really discussing whether you can start infringing, I guess, on the Second Amendment or not with some controls up here.
00:00:27.920We've always been heavily controlled, but our prime minister has reacted by cracking down even harder now.
00:00:32.640And it looks like they're working towards banning all legally owned handguns in Canada in response to something that never even happened up here.
00:00:40.960But, you know, where do we go from there? I guess like I'll just start out, though, like from a there is a problem.
00:00:49.460I mean, I think it's hard to deny whether it's cultural, where do we go with it?
00:00:53.460But I mean, there's not really many developed nations that are dealing with such, even if they're sporadic and horrifying, you know, shootings like that in schools.
00:01:00.660Like, where do we look to try and reduce those and stop that sort of thing from happening?
00:01:05.820Well, I think, Corey, we have to look at the fact that in the United States, and like you said, this ripples over into Canada because anything that you can get in the United States can easily be taken to Canada through multiple points of ingress and egress.
00:01:20.160In the United States, there are more guns than people. Now, whether you like that or not doesn't really matter.
00:01:27.240There are more guns than people. That's not going to end without some kind of massive door to door gun confiscation program, which ironically would end in much more gun violence than any other proposal being floated.
00:01:40.320So unless you're going to try to pretend that we can make guns go away, which we can't, there are guns. They simply exist.
00:01:47.960So now we have to decide how do we interact with and allow people to or not allow people to have access to those guns?
00:01:56.100Who should we be allowing or not allowing to have those guns?
00:01:59.040And that results in the kind of policies that we have right now, which led to the Evalde shooting.
00:02:03.380Let's be clear what happened there. Government mandated through the no gun zone laws that they passed in the 80s and 90s.
00:02:11.880I'm not sure exactly when it happened in Texas, but it was in that period.
00:02:14.860They mandated that school children in public schools be vulnerable and completely unguarded from attack, which has led to school shooters picking schools as their target for mass shootings because they know that they're fishing to barrel zones.
00:02:29.020There's no one there that's going to protect them. Then they had the police stay outside for over an hour and stop horrified parents from going in to try to protect or protect their children or stop the shooting from happening.
00:02:43.700Then they tried to lie about it and say that, you know, that there was nothing they could do.
00:02:47.380They had tried everything they could when the reality was they had literally stood there.
00:02:51.020Then finally someone showed up and broke the government's orders and stepped in and stopped the shooter.
00:02:57.160And then they lie. Then they are now blaming it on the fact that, you know, I and many other Americans may or may not own a rifle, that that's the reason why this happened.
00:03:06.620You cannot legislate bad people into not having guns, at least not in the U.S. and by extension, not in Canada, because in order to be a shooter or a mass shooter or a murderer, you have to have two things.
00:03:19.040First, not caring what the law is and a desire to hurt lots and lots of people.
00:03:24.420Oh, you need a third thing, too. You need to not care what the consequences of your actions are.
00:03:29.160The laws aren't going to stop someone like that. What they are going to stop are law abiding people who might actually defend themselves against someone like that.
00:03:37.260Yeah, and that's what we keep getting to. I mean, the bottom line is law abiding people are the low hanging fruit.
00:03:41.880They're the easy ones to go after because they're compliant. And we've seen this, as you pointed out, in Canada, we have a 9000 kilometer border between our countries.
00:03:50.120It's huge. It's the longest undefended border in the world. And it's very easy to smuggle things across it, particularly small items like handguns.
00:03:57.660And it's been it's been documented by the police. Toronto has a big gang war going on. They have a lot of shootings over 86 percent of the firearms they've picked up off the gangsters were smuggled in from the United States.
00:04:09.540But what's the Canadian reaction? Let's go after the law abiding handgun owners who are already very seriously controlled and were never committing the crimes in the first place.
00:04:18.640But I mean, how do you stop that knee jerk reaction? That's the problem.
00:04:23.060Well, and this is a tale as old as time, Corey, in the U.S. and possibly in Canada as well.
00:04:27.840During alcohol prohibition, during that war on that particular drug, thanks to alcohol prohibition, it created a black market for rum for at that point.
00:04:38.280They were two bit thugs, but they turned into some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country inside of a year or two because they were handed a billion dollar industry for them to have exclusive.
00:04:48.560Control over. And as a result, they engaged in brutal gang warfare in order to to fight each other for turf.
00:04:56.740This, by the way, was something that did not happen when alcohol was legal, because you if you had a legal product that you were selling, why would you engage in brutal gang warfare?
00:05:05.160You would just compete with your competitors legally like all other legal products.
00:05:09.220And and as a result of that, the government blamed the Tommy gun.
00:05:13.740That was the problem. It wasn't the fact that they had created a black market and that the black marketeers were fighting each other.
00:05:20.140No, it was a gun that had existed for at least a couple of decades at that point.
00:05:24.200That was the problem. And so they passed the NFA.
00:05:26.520We're seeing that now. The war on drugs has created gang violence, which is blamed on the gun.
00:05:32.680And it makes no sense at all. Well, yeah, that's getting to where I wanted to go with that, too, because I mean, actually here in Calgary, we have a record amount of shootings happening as well.
00:05:41.040And pretty much all of them are always gang related.
00:05:43.220When you have a limited commodity, the unprincipled are always going to get in there and they're going because it makes it profitable.
00:05:48.980I mean, we used to have cigarette smuggling when we put the cigarette taxes up too high in Canada 30 years ago.
00:05:54.060We literally have cheese smuggling, a side note, but because we control our dairy up here so much that it's actually 30 percent cheaper to get dairy products from the United States if you can get them across the border.
00:06:03.960But the underlying issue then is the addiction issues.
00:06:10.040We've got more people addicted to items like fentanyl and meth and things like that than we've ever seen in the past.
00:06:14.860That brings about a massive drug trade that's very lucrative and they're having their turf wars.
00:06:20.340But again, how can we realistically get to that?
00:06:22.760I mean, I suspect yourself and more like me, but it's a hard thing to sell if we start moving towards decriminalizing actually some of these drugs and cutting into that.
00:06:30.820We can get to the solution of that problem.
00:06:32.320But that's difficult to get past on people.
00:06:34.200They're too busy looking at the firearms.
00:06:36.260It is both from the firearms perspective and from the drug itself.
00:06:40.360You know, it's hard saying I think that these drugs should be legal or at least decriminalized to people who have, for example, lost a loved one to an opioid overdose or to someone who lost a loved one to the gang violence in the drug trade.
00:06:54.300But the reality is those things are a side effect of illegalizing that drug trade.
00:07:00.000Or at least it's been greatly made worse by that.
00:07:03.140I mean, tens of thousands of people die from alcohol poisoning every year in the U.S.
00:07:18.840When you treat a health problem, which is what addiction and overdose is, when you treat it as a criminal problem, you now create a much larger criminal problem.
00:07:47.360And you have people that have a legitimate health problem that are being treated like criminals or not being treated at all and end up dying in the streets as a result of it.
00:08:34.860But it just is it a perception that we're seeing this more now?
00:08:38.200Or are there really more of these shootings happening?
00:08:41.960So if you look at the data, the number of murders, including murders by gun, have been kind of, at least in the U.S., I don't know the Canadian stats.
00:08:51.100So these could be completely wrong for Canada.
00:08:52.740But in the U.S., they've been kind of slowly dropping.
00:08:56.000They reached a peak in the 1960s and 70s.
00:08:58.580Some would argue because of the massive gun control that had happened in the 60s and 70s that it reached a peak around them because a record number of Americans were unable to legally defend themselves.
00:09:08.440Regardless of whether it was because of that or not, starting in the 60s, starting in the 80s, it started to slowly drop.
00:09:14.200In the last few years, it's been ticking back up, but it's still nowhere near the highs that it was even 20, 30 years ago.
00:09:22.600Mass shootings had a major increase in the 1990s.
00:09:27.200But part of what happened was they lowered the number of deaths from, I think, or number of shootings from a number of people that had to be shot from either, I think, five down to three to qualify it as a mass shooting.
00:09:37.500So it's hard to compare apples to apples there.
00:09:40.160What I do know is that looking at it at a granular level, at the why would someone choose to go and kill a bunch of people level, I think that we're looking at very often a failure of the health system to identify actual mental health issues.
00:09:55.400I think we're looking at a failure of the school system, at least in the U.S. we're looking at that.
00:10:00.520And I think we're looking at a lot of failures that result in someone who feels so angry and desperate that they end up doing something terrible like this.
00:10:07.280And I think in some cases it's just that some people, whether you want to call it evil or whatever else, some people end up just doing something like this.
00:10:13.660And that's where you need to look at the deterrent effect.
00:10:16.660You have to look at what are the targets they choose.
00:10:20.880The reason they pick schools and malls and theaters and things like that is because they know that these are no gun zones.
00:10:27.820In other words, they're a place where a bunch of people who are law abiding are likely to not have a gun.
00:10:32.920And they know that the police and the resource officers and the security guards, they're more concerned about their own lives and livelihoods than they are for saving a bunch of innocent people.
00:10:42.600And so they know they can get in there and shoot up a bunch of people before anyone actually stops them, if they ever stop them.
00:10:47.940And we need to, I will ask your audience and you that is listening to this.
00:10:52.780Imagine two schools exactly the same, except one has a sign that says no guns allowed.
00:10:57.440And the other one says we are heavily armed and will protect these children with our lives.
00:11:00.860Which one do you think is a greater deterrent to school students?
00:11:05.000I mean, it's similar to just even owning a dog.
00:11:06.960If a burglar is scouting houses in a neighborhood and he sees one with a barking dog in the window and one without, he's going to pick the one without.
00:12:01.080It's ironic when we talk about things like background checks and licensing and everything else.
00:12:04.800If we looked at government as an entity and had them subjected to these background checks and these types of things, they would never pass their own background checks given their history.
00:12:13.260But you have to look at it at another level.
00:12:15.500So, for example, this Evaldi shooter, and I refuse to use his name, but this shooter, he legally purchased this firearm, which means he passed a background check.
00:12:31.280Do you know who, what licensing and regulations and waiting periods and all these other, and background checks, do you know who they stop?
00:12:41.980They stop veterans with PTSD who use cannabis for their, or anyone else who's using cannabis medicinally for a medicinal reason that they have.
00:12:51.780They stop people that have a conviction for a nonviolent felony 20 years ago who haven't hurt anyone since and have never been violent.
00:12:59.460They round up a bunch of people, people who can't afford the cost of running through all these background checks and inspections and everything else that sometimes double or triple the cost of a firearm.
00:13:44.680Your argument was similar when I had some debates with my own and some of the more small-c conservative viewers when I opposed capital punishment.
00:13:49.800My point is, it's similar to saying, are there some people who are so horrific that they'd probably be better off dead?
00:14:21.980The one he was talking about, oh, let's take all the AK or AR-15s and send them over to Ukraine.
00:14:26.860You know, just kind of a vacuous celebrity sort of tweet.
00:14:28.920But where you pointed out, well, how much damage would be caused if you really actually try to go door-to-door and seize every AR-15 in the country?
00:14:36.260You're going to cause more shootings than you ever imagined.
00:14:39.640And in order to – I love watching, in this case, the progressives.
00:14:44.400They fully are on board with giving millions, tens of millions of unregistered, untraceable machine guns to an entire country of people right now or any kind of gun, rifles, machine guns, advanced weapon systems, javelin missiles, long-range weapon systems.
00:15:03.360Surely that will never come back to bite us like any of the other times that we've handed off billions of dollars of weapons, right?
00:15:16.220It worked great with all these freedom fighters that we've armed in the past, like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
00:15:20.580They'll never come back to bite us, right?
00:15:22.700But at the same time, your neighbor who just wants to be able to defend their home absolutely should not have a semi-automatic rifle because a bad guy who would have gotten that gun regardless of the laws did something bad,
00:15:36.800something terrible and unspeakable and absolute travesty, but that that's the fault of my neighbor who has a gun.
00:15:44.800But these other people over there, they should have machine guns or whatever else they can have.
00:15:47.940It is a cognitive dissonance that I hope resolves itself soon.
00:15:53.920Well, people are trying to apply simple solutions to a very complicated problem, and they want a quick fix and an easy fix where there just isn't one to be had.
00:16:02.100So I just hope we can keep having these rational discussions while we maintain what individual rights we have.
00:16:07.440I assure you, at least you're nowhere near where we are up in Canada with where things are going right now.