By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A Canadian writer who specializes in that nation’s firearms policy is telling readers in an Op-Ed published by the National Post they should not believe gun control advocates who claim gun bans will save lives, a position with possibly as much merit in the United States as it has north of the border.
Writing in the National Post’s Sunday edition, Tom Thurley, who resides in Canada’s Northwest Territories, is blunt: “Multiple groups and individuals, portraying themselves as experts in firearm research, have misstated the current body of comparable research on firearm deaths in Canada and continue to mislead readers at home and abroad.”
A couple of paragraphs later in his lengthy article, Thurley observes, “Canada has a substantial body of domestic research on firearm control issues. I know. I’ve even written some. It showed that the so-called “erosion” of gun control from 2006 to 2015 — which was mostly just the elimination of a costly, wasteful and ineffective register of non-restricted hunting and sporting guns — had no demonstrated effect on homicide, a fact backed by other rigorous research.”
By no small coincidence, a report published jointly in ProPublica and the Texas Tribune this week discussing the failures of law enforcement to promptly respond to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas because the killer was armed with an AR-15-type rifle last year includes this paragraph:
“Limiting access to these kinds of rifles may not decrease the frequency of mass shootings, which plagued the country before the rifle became popular among gun owners. During the decade that the federal assault weapons ban was in place, beginning in 1994, the number of mass shootings was roughly the same as in the decade prior, according to a mass shooting database maintained by Mother Jones. It also would not address the root causes that motivate mass shooters, merely limit the lethality of the tools at their disposal.”
Canadian Thurley’s observations could easily apply to the political situation in several states right now. Bans on so-called “assault weapons” are under consideration in Washington, Illinois, Michigan and other states. Existing bans in California and Maryland are being challenged in the federal courts. Thurley says bans on specific firearm types are “not backed by evidence.” Yet, it is just such bans that “gun control lobbyists are pushing and what the government is attempting to do,” he notes.
The same is true in the U.S., with President Joe Biden repeatedly declaring his intention to ban “assault rifles” and even 9mm pistols in this country.
“The very study commonly cited by Doctors for Protection from Guns in supporting expansion of Canada’s suite of firearm type prohibitions states that ‘evidence suggests that laws restricting the sales of certain firearms are not associated with variations in all (homicides) or firearm homicides’,” Thurley wrote.
