LILLEY: Trudeau promises to get tough on hunters after boy, 12, killed in gang shooting
Author of the article:
Brian Lilley
Publishing date:
Nov 14, 2020
Police investigate after a shooting at 25 Strong Ct. in North York on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. Photo by Veronica Henri /Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network
Article content
I’m not sure how the killers were able to get their hands on the guns that allowed them to shoot and kill a 12-year-old boy in North York last weekend.
But the two men accused of the deadly shooting — Jahwayne Smart, 25, and Rashawn Chambers, 24 — are both convicted criminals prohibited from owning firearms and the federal government banned all the dangerous guns last spring in their attempt to show they were tough on gun crime.
I’m not trying to be flippant, I’m reacting to the fact that another innocent bystander was gunned down – this time a child walking home from a grocery store with his mom – while the Trudeau government insists they are dealing with gun crime. Of course their idea of dealing with gun crimes is to seize guns, not deal with criminals, and the only guns they know how to seize are the ones owned by legal gun owners.
There have been 425 shootings so far this year in Toronto with 201 people being injured or killed. Despite Trudeau’s May 1 announcement that he would ban “military-style assault rifles,” shootings in the country’s largest city have not gone down. The city is on track to blow past last year’s record-high for shootings.
Despite the failure of this government, despite the fact that both of the accused were subject to gun bans, the first question that Trudeau faced on Friday at his news conference was on the issue of gun control and why he hasn’t brought in a handgun ban.
“Where is the legislation you promised?” the Toronto Star asked, as if a handgun ban on top of the bans imposed on both of the accused would have stopped this shooting.
“Obviously, our hearts go out to families who have been victims of gun violence,” Trudeau said, spouting the standard boilerplate comments politicians make. “We made a commitment to ban military-style assault weapons and we have.”
That will be cold comfort to the family of the little boy or any of the other people who have lost loved ones over the last year in Toronto or any other place where gun violence has erupted. Trudeau’s plan was never about dealing with gangsters who use guns to shoot up the streets, it was always about making the public feel they had done something about gun crime.
Taking guns away from licensed owners won’t stop gangsters though. Taking guns away from gangsters might, but that is difficult and so the government doesn’t act on that.
Despite promising more than $250 million to deal with gun crime in the last election, that money has not been spent. The gun ban was announced though, effectively making many of the more than two million legal and licensed gun owners into criminals with the stroke of a pen without doing a thing to stop gun crime.
Last Saturday’s shooting not only saw an innocent boy killed, but as my colleague Joe Warmington has reported, the gang members targeting their rivals were using guns with over-capacity magazines, which are illegal in Canada. And video of the shooting shows clear signs the gunmen were using automatic weapons, something banned since the 1970s in Canada.
Yet somehow Trudeau is trying to tell the public he is dealing with the issue of gun crime.
He is doing nothing of the sort. What he is doing is trying to distract a public worried about the very real issue of shootings in our streets by telling licensed gun owners they are the problem.
If Trudeau and his Liberal government really care about stopping gun violence, they should focus on the criminals and not legal gun owners going to the range or hunting on the weekends.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/colu...vIrF-x6hEqOzIHy1ibRQoTntZfP0XW8DN_Q7WXFCMFSgo