There was a story in the paper recently about a man that came home home to find his house ransacked.
When he walked in to see what had happened he was confronted by a stranger with a rifle. It wasn’t long ago that you would never hear of something that disturbing happening in Campbell River or any small town in Canada.
The week before four people were shot to death in New Brunswick. A week before that there was a mass shooting in Toronto. This is not normal. Times have changed.
Ralph Goodale was interviewed about it and said that actually the crime rate has gone down in Canada over the last few years. Maybe so, but the rate of gun violence is on the increase. What can be done about it is the question.
Politicians are always afraid of introducing anything that makes people think that their guns might be taken away. They are afraid to lose votes. There has to be a tipping point somewhere though. At some point they may get more votes if they actually do something about the problem.
We might not be there yet though. We may have to lose more lives before we get there. The four countries in the world that we might want to look at though are Australia, Norway, Japan and the U.K. They have successfully fixed their gun violence problems, mostly by buying back guns from their citizens. They have decreased the number of weapons in their countries in a huge way, while not forcing anyone to give up their guns.
Japan has gone further by requiring anyone who wants a gun to go through psychological testing and character references. In Norway the police and the public work together to stop a gunman before it is too late. In Norway they have had the same number of gun deaths in the last nine years that the U.S.A. has on an average day.
Let’s urge our politicians to do something about this problem before anyone else has to die.
James Anderson