Another Difference For Us Now

When we left the US, it was partly because we felt that the coun­try was going in a direc­tion that we did not agree with, and that the coun­try was con­tin­u­ing its slide into an uglier and more neg­a­tive culture.

Lit­tle did we know that it would also con­tinue move toward a more vio­lent and deadly culture.

All around the world, News­pa­per Edi­to­ri­als, some from coun­tries that have now lost cit­i­zens to the killer of 32 stu­dents and teach­ers, have chas­tised the US for mak­ing the pur­chase of a gun about as easy as a gal­lon of milk. The State of Vir­ginia in par­tic­u­lar has some of the most lax gun laws in Amer­ica, with no back­ground check at gun shows, no wait­ing period before get­ting a gun, no safety train­ing before buy­ing a gun and par­tic­u­larly hor­ri­fy­ing: no restric­tions on the sale or pos­ses­sion of military-style semi-automatic weapons. In Vir­ginia, you can buy an AK47 or an Uzi with the same ease as a hunt­ing rifle.

Appar­ently the Columbine High School mas­sacre (which hap­pened 8 years ago this com­ing Fri­day) was not enough. Italy’s lead­ing daily news­pa­per, the Cor­riere della Sera summed it up well:

The lat­est attack on a U.S. cam­pus will shake up Amer­ica, maybe it will pro­voke more vig­or­ous reac­tions than in the past, but it won’t change the cul­ture of a coun­try that has the notion of self-defense imprinted on its DNA and which con­sid­ers the right of hav­ing guns inalienable.

I’d like to say that this would never hap­pen in Canada, but we also had a shoot­ing at Daw­son Col­lege in Mon­treal last Sep­tem­ber. How­ever, even though Kimveer Gill, another 20-something, opened fire last Sep­tem­ber, killing a young woman and wound­ing 19 oth­ers before he turned the gun on him­self, police responded far more quickly. Maybe this was just luck; It’s hard to say.

What I do know for cer­tain, is that I don’t know a sin­gle per­son here who owns a hand­gun. It’s sim­ply not some­thing that nor­mal, law-abiding cit­i­zens con­sider. How­ever, when we lived in the US, I knew sev­eral peo­ple who had them, and this was in one of the most ‘Lib­eral’ areas of the whole country.

Com­mon sense has always told me that if you have guns around, the like­li­hood of some­one using them to kill some­one else is far greater than if they sim­ply aren’t there. I don’t buy the argu­ment that if you make guns harder to get, ‘then only crim­i­nals will have guns’. Here in Canada and through­out the rest of the civ­i­lized world, that has not been the result. While we can’t claim a per­fect record here, we feel safer, that this is a more peace­ful and less vio­lent place. Maybe that’s what we have to set­tle for these days.