Gun Control
The politics and ethics of gun control has long used topics such as self-defense, armed robbery, murder, and mass shootings to guide debates. Though the harsh realities that emerge from these topics may present as sufficient justification for stricter gun legislation, there remains, what seems to be, an irreconcilable divide between advocates of stricter gun legislation and its dissenters. Understanding this gap, this story unpacks the gun control debate, with a focus on the U.S. and Canada to understand the moral and legal foundations that drive gun ownership.
On May 14th a white man entered a Buffalo supermarket and shot 13 people, killing 10 of them who were Black, in a racially motivated shooting. In seeing the news about the killings, I remember feeling disgusted. I remember being deeply perturbed and frustrated that an attack of this nature was capacitated by legal methods of obtaining a gun. But somehow, days later, I found myself at a vigil for the victims of the Buffalo shooting to stand in solidarity with likeminded people. It was this day—this moment of reflection and group mourning—that I decided to write about the Buffalo shooting as a race related issue. That was, until just 10 days later, when 19 children and two teachers were murdered in Uvalde, Texas. It was then I realized that what binds these troubling issues together was not racism or socio-economic status, but gun control.
Conversations about gun control are most prominent in the aftermath of mass shootings or tragic killings, often saturating media headlines for a time. Understandably, the moral panic, hysteria, and proximity are what act as the driving forces. In these conversations we continually find ourselves caught in this feedback loop where we exhaustively dispute the harm principles and consequences of guns. We then use these arguments as justifications in support of, or against, further gun control measures. This delicate dance has gone on for decades in Canada and the U.S., but why? In this piece I seek to unpack the origins of gun control in the U.S. and Canada to understand how we got here.
The focus of this piece is assessing why people feel the need to own and use illegal firearms. I use three broad categories to unpack the impetus for illegal gun possession. I consider these categories to be protection, profit motive, and criminal activity. Each of these will be discussed in greater detail as we seek to understand the landscape of violent crime to evaluate current gun policies.
An emergent theme among gun rights advocates is the belief that individuals who responsibly and legally own and operate firearms aren’t the problem. This perception has led gun rights advocates (particularly in the US) to lobby for protections of gun ownership. In this piece I unpack the desire to own firearms in what seems to be liberal democracies where modern gun ownership is decreasingly necessary.
Each year, nearly 40, 000 people are killed from gun related crime in the US. Part of this is owed to the fact that there are more guns in circulation than the population (nearly 393 million to be exact) in the US, contributing to over 200 gun-related deaths and injuries daily. These deaths take the form of suicide and homicide, where the US represents 35% of global firearm suicides and 9% of global firearm homicides despite making up only 4% of the world’s population. Although one would surmise that these facts are understood by legislators and law enforcement officials, there remain heated discussions around gun control regarding the need to implement stricter gun laws across the industry. This debate is rooted in one key question: does gun control work?
My goal in this piece is to unpack the effects of gun control laws to comparatively assess what forms of gun control work.
After analyzing the efficacy of gun control laws in my last piece, I’ve concluded that only specific types of gun control legislation and programs tackling gun crime work. But how do Canada’s gun control measures fare in comparison to the research? Overall, my position is that in comparison, the Canadian Government has introduced effective measures to combat gun crime. But I also believe that more can be done through the following actions: focusing on the flows of guns from the US to Canada through bilateral agreements, targeting the border, reducing the current stock of guns, targeting the root causes of gun crime.
Having arrived at this conclusion, my goal here is to systematically evaluate Canada’s gun control legislation to demonstrate how I’ve arrived at this position, while allowing you to understand the research and derive conclusions for yourselves.
What would a community or public health-based approach look like for gun violence reduction, and how has it worked for other cities? In this piece we look at four violence reduction strategies that have been established and studied in U.S. cities. Each violence reduction strategy is modeled after the ‘Cure Violence’ model. As such, the subsequent models discussed will focus on the study results. Using these programs, we can identify the gaps in a violence reduction strategy to establish a cohesive and flexible one.