In the firearms control debate, there is often a divide between those who want to ban firearms and those who want to strengthen background checks. What if I told you there was a parallel country with a similar culture and with similar gun laws with lengthier background checks? Well, there is, and it’s the Maple State. That’s right, our Northern Cousins have been quietly giving out background checks and mandating safety courses right next to us since 1991.
So why do we not hear about Canada’s gun laws more often in our own debates? Well, the answer is a bit complicated. The biggest root of the issue is the culture. Canada has roughly a third of the guns per capita as the United States, with 30 per 100 people as opposed to a near perfect ratio of 100 guns per 101 people stateside.
Americans having more guns likely boils down to our constitution. For those of you who are uninformed, the second amendment of the United States Constitution reads as such: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This makes the need for firearms not for hunting, personal self-defense, or paper target shooting, but explicitly for the defense of a people against an oppressive State. Canada views guns strictly as recreational. The “you don’t need an AR-15 to defend your home” argument doesn’t apply. If a Canadian citizen wishes to go shoot some targets for fun, they are free to do so without debate.
This doesn’t mean that owning any gun is free game, in fact far from it. Magazines on semi-automatic rifles are restricted to five rounds per magazine and magazines on pistols are restricted to ten rounds. The background check process is as follows: “[a]n applicant for a firearm license in Canada must pass background checks which consider criminal, mental, addiction and domestic violence records.” and “third party character references for each gun license applicant are required.” This process is much more extensive that the United States’ and could have alone prevented much of the gun violence caused by mass shootings.
An article in the National Post looked at how Canadian gun laws could have prevented previous mass shootings in the United States. Though a few shootings were carefully plotted and actively worked to thwart government prevention, most of these shootings could have been stopped by background check red flags in the canadian system. Authorities being aware of threatening behavior, charges of domestic assault, and terrorism investigations would have all been indicators that could have stopped these shootings. It is worth noting for the sake of clarification that despite their public healthcare, Canada does not have mental healthcare that is suitably better than The United States’.
Though the cultural shift can account for a lot of differences in the way guns are debated in both countries, the similar mental health situations and relative success of these background checks seem to be clear. The United States is averaging almost six times more firearm homicides per 100,000 people (2.97 per) than Canada (0.51). Getting rid of guns entirely isn’t the solution, but regulating them and making sure people know how to use them might be.
*note that these firearm deaths do not include suicides that many news sites use to inflate their firearm death count
