Column: Human evil, not guns, is the issue that must be addressed
Date: Sep 19, 2006 9:38 AM
PUBLICATION: The Daily News (Halifax)
DATE: 2006.09.18
SECTION: Perspective
PAGE: 10
BYLINE: CHARLES MOORE
ILLUSTRATION: NO IMPACT: Canada’s firearms law was of little use as
Kimveer Gill’s three weapons were reportedly legally obtained and
registered.
WORD COUNT: 822

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Human evil, not guns, is the issue that must be addressed

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper correctly observed last Thursday that it
is too soon to start political 1/2ghts over how shootings by another
deranged lunatic at Montreal’s Dawson College might have been prevented.

But that didn’t stop anti-gun advocates, including Quebec Premier Jean
Charest, from politicizing the tragedy almost before the sound of
ambulance sirens had faded. Some media speculated Kimveer Gill’s
murderous rampage will likely “reopen the gun debate,” particularly over
the Harper government’s plan to scrap the federal long-gun registry.

That registry was implemented by the Jean Chretien Liberals largely as a
reactionary something-must- be-done response to another Montreal school
shooting by unhinged madman Marc Lepine at L’Ecole Polytechnique in
December 1989, where 14 young women were killed.

However, Gill’s restricted Beretta CX4 Storm semi-automatic carbine, and
the other two weapons he carried to Dawson College, were reportedly
legally obtained and registered under Canadian 1/ 2rearms law. Lapine’s
Ruger Mini-14, now selectively and irrationally banned in Canada, was
legal in 1989. Lepine had a Firearms Acquisition Certi1/2cate, no
criminal record, and would have had no trouble registering his weapon
had long-gun registration been in place at the time.

The point being that the problem is not guns per se, but human evil,
which will 1/2nd hideous means of violent expression regardless, if not
with guns then with knives or if need be rocks and pointed sticks. Guns
do not make people violent. I know literally dozens of gun owners, some
with a dozen or more guns. My family doctor collects both long guns and
handguns and is a recreational target shooter. No one in my acquaintance
has yet harmed another person with a gun (one friend tragically
committed suicide).

From 1991 through the gun registry startup in 1998, gun murders had
declined 44 per cent in Canada to 151 a year from 271. In the 1/ 2rst
1/2ve years after the registry opened, 1/2rearms murders increased by 13
per cent. Go 1/2gure.

Firearms suicides dropped to 802 in 1999 from about 1,100 in 1991, and
accidental 1/2rearms deaths deaths declined to 37 from 66, virtually all
without the registry in operation, evidence that registration is
probably virtually irrelevant to the incidence of gun mortality.

Canada is already one of the stiffest gun-control jurisdictions in the
world. Handguns have been highly restricted since 1934. Anyone
purchasing a long gun or ammunition after 1979 needed a firearms
certificate, which required a police background check. However. the
Liberals saw an issue that would ingratiate them with urban liberal
voters and ran with it, disregarding the facts. Interestingly, 58 per
cent of respondents to an unscienti1/2c CTV online poll after the Gill
shootings said Canadian 1/2rearms laws should be “less strict.”

Toward preventing atrocities such as Dawson College and L’Ecole
Polytechnique, a more effective avenue of address might be sick and
violent video games, like two of Kimveer Gill’s reported faves: Super
Columbine Massacre – in which players recreate the killing spree of a
couple of alienated nut-jobs at Littleton, Colo., in 1999 that left 13
people dead, and Postal 2: Share the Pain, in which the player goes on a
shooting spree. It speaks volumes that one of Gill’s last Weblog entries
before setting out for Dawson College was “Going postal …”

Unfortunately, experts, and I unhappily agree, deduce that little if
anything effective can be done about video-game depravity at the
regulatory level. The Internet is borderless, and to a considerable
degree lawless. More assiduous monitoring of blogsites like the one Gill
maintained on VampireFreaks.com, which provided plenty of cause for
alarm, could have more preemptory effectiveness.

However, ultimately, it’s a problem spawned by an aggressively secular
and licentious culture is in willful denial about the innate potential
for human evil.

I don’t believe young people today are more intrinsically evil than kids
were 50 or 100 or 2,000 years ago. Human tendency toward wrongdoing -
de1/2ned in Judeo-Christian theology as original sin – is always in
tension with our potential for good behaviour. What’s different is that
youth in the early 21st century are immersed in one of the most morally
bankrupt and depraved popular cultures that has yet blighted the planet.

When a more coherent grasp of reality obtained in our society, human
propensity for evil was consensually acknowledged, with pro- active
measures in the form of codes of conduct, af1/2rmed moral standards,
etiquette, social taboos, shaming, and when necessary – rigorous penal
measures, implemented to keep it in check.

That, not gun registration, is what we need more of.

Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotian freelance writer and editor whose
articles, features, and commentaries have appeared in more than 40
magazines and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.