By MICHAEL COREN
It's become as regular and predictable as a half-witted Canadian poet applying for a public grant. Assorted leftist politicians, misnamed peace activists and fellow travelling dunderheads calling for a total ban on handguns. It happens every time someone is killed on Canada's streets by an evil punk with a pistol.
Which should lead us to call for a total ban of evil punks. But no. That would require original thought and original policies. To adapt the words of the great and now greatly missed Charlton Heston, they'll take my welfare cheque for having yet another child by an anonymous father from my cold, dead hands.
Because that is what so much of this is all about. The killing that provoked the latest spasm took place in Toronto. Where so many murders and shootings are carried out by young men who have never known their father and barely their mother.
We're force-fed the urban myth that all of these single moms are crosses between Mother Teresa and Mary Poppins, but the truth is that while some may be sacrificing darlings, others are entirely indifferent to their kids. If they weren't, they'd have been careful to make sure they gave themselves to men who might hang around a little longer.
We can quote statistics all day about the violent crime rates in Britain where there is a handgun ban and the safety of Scandinavian nations where there is no ban at all, but the zealots base their arguments not on facts but on raw emotion. A crying cousin of a victim is worth a hundred informed arguments.
IRONIC
These gun-haters, ironically, tend to be the very same people who also campaign for more rights for criminals, shorter sentences and emptier prisons. In other words, we'll ban handguns but only slap you on the wrist if you break the ban anyway.
They also tend by their nature to be state-control freaks. Yet if every cop who spends dozens of hours setting up and manning speed traps for harmless people driving marginally over the limit, giving out tickets for minor infringements and generally playing social worker actually targeted gun-carrying hoodlums we'd be a far safer country.
One brief example of the nonsense. Last year a child was shot dead in a Toronto school. He was immediately painted as an angel by everyone around him and that may be true -- it's odd, however, how so many young people involved in gang violence, whether victims or perpetrators, turn out to be so saintly.
I covered the boy's funeral live on radio. After a few speeches a young person stepped to the microphone and announced that "the youth" would now be in charge of the ceremony and they would play the dead boy's favourite song.
It was a recording from a convicted felon and used so many obscene and violent words in the first stanza that we had to hurriedly cut away, leading us to ask why there was no adult supervision of this part of the funeral and what sort of message a filthy, misogynistic, gangster-glorifying song was doing at such a time and place.
Perhaps a total ban of handguns would have transformed the culture and climate of this event and the community around it. Then again, perhaps that's total garbage. Let's not disarm the law-abiding, but arrest the lawless. You'll take my ability to think away from my cold, dead mind.
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Coren_Michael/2008/04/12/5265941-sun.php
It's become as regular and predictable as a half-witted Canadian poet applying for a public grant. Assorted leftist politicians, misnamed peace activists and fellow travelling dunderheads calling for a total ban on handguns. It happens every time someone is killed on Canada's streets by an evil punk with a pistol.
Which should lead us to call for a total ban of evil punks. But no. That would require original thought and original policies. To adapt the words of the great and now greatly missed Charlton Heston, they'll take my welfare cheque for having yet another child by an anonymous father from my cold, dead hands.
Because that is what so much of this is all about. The killing that provoked the latest spasm took place in Toronto. Where so many murders and shootings are carried out by young men who have never known their father and barely their mother.
We're force-fed the urban myth that all of these single moms are crosses between Mother Teresa and Mary Poppins, but the truth is that while some may be sacrificing darlings, others are entirely indifferent to their kids. If they weren't, they'd have been careful to make sure they gave themselves to men who might hang around a little longer.
We can quote statistics all day about the violent crime rates in Britain where there is a handgun ban and the safety of Scandinavian nations where there is no ban at all, but the zealots base their arguments not on facts but on raw emotion. A crying cousin of a victim is worth a hundred informed arguments.
IRONIC
These gun-haters, ironically, tend to be the very same people who also campaign for more rights for criminals, shorter sentences and emptier prisons. In other words, we'll ban handguns but only slap you on the wrist if you break the ban anyway.
They also tend by their nature to be state-control freaks. Yet if every cop who spends dozens of hours setting up and manning speed traps for harmless people driving marginally over the limit, giving out tickets for minor infringements and generally playing social worker actually targeted gun-carrying hoodlums we'd be a far safer country.
One brief example of the nonsense. Last year a child was shot dead in a Toronto school. He was immediately painted as an angel by everyone around him and that may be true -- it's odd, however, how so many young people involved in gang violence, whether victims or perpetrators, turn out to be so saintly.
I covered the boy's funeral live on radio. After a few speeches a young person stepped to the microphone and announced that "the youth" would now be in charge of the ceremony and they would play the dead boy's favourite song.
It was a recording from a convicted felon and used so many obscene and violent words in the first stanza that we had to hurriedly cut away, leading us to ask why there was no adult supervision of this part of the funeral and what sort of message a filthy, misogynistic, gangster-glorifying song was doing at such a time and place.
Perhaps a total ban of handguns would have transformed the culture and climate of this event and the community around it. Then again, perhaps that's total garbage. Let's not disarm the law-abiding, but arrest the lawless. You'll take my ability to think away from my cold, dead mind.
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Coren_Michael/2008/04/12/5265941-sun.php
