On 10 February, Canada saw one of its worst school shootings, killing 8 and wounding 25. This incident has led to calls for further gun control in hopes that this will prevent further tragedies. Some anti-gun proponents cite how places with stricter gun laws have fewer shootings, and while this is sometimes true, I doubt that gun laws are the sole reason.
Firstly, in Canada there are stricter gun laws than in the neighbouring US, which is often the centre of gun control debates. To own any firearms [writer’s aside: The Canadian distinction for when air rifles become regulated is actually stricter than in the UK], you need one of two licences (possession and acquisition licence or PAL, alternatively a restricted possession and acquisition licence or RPAL) with RPALs being harder to obtain, requiring a good reason to own a firearm but allowing for ownership of restricted handguns, short barrel rifles or semi-automatic rifles. Additionally, there are many firearms which are expressly banned by name, such as: Armalite rifle (AR) 15s (over 900 specifically named variants), AK-47s, MP5s, FN-FALs, and Benelli M1 shotguns. This is just to name a few.
You may be wondering how this compares to UK gun laws. Well, firstly, the UK’s Firearms Act of 1968 (amended) does not explicitly ban firearms but does ban or restrict certain features. [Writer’s aside: I have shot three guns, albeit firing .22 Rimfire, that would be explicitly banned in Canada.] So, in some sense, the laws in Canada are more draconian than in places that have fewer shootings. This leads to one key question: why did such a shooting occur?
Needless to say, I am just a student, so am not an absolute authority on this topic, so I would strongly encourage research and coming to your own conclusions on this topic.
I would argue that a mix of factors leads to shootings in schools, such as isolation, bullying, disenfranchisement from the world we live in, among other mental health issues. Additionally, violence in schools seems to have become more common in more recent years; for example, the article below the one which told me about the shooting in Canada was about a stabbing at a school in London. The only reason I can attribute to why different weapons are used is due to cultural differences.
While I do not know how to stop this trend, I can guarantee that more laws and restrictions will not have any impact. Most bans or restrictions are passed by politicians as token acts to make it seem like they are tackling the problem in the easiest way possible for them. In my observations, these bills play on people’s fear of things they don’t understand, using inflammatory language to describe guns, the most common one being ‘assault weapons,’ the definition of which varies: ‘weapons designed for military use,’ or ‘assault weapons are semiautomatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition that were designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use,’ or ‘any of various automatic or semiautomatic firearms.’ This vague definition is often left up to interpretation, as can be seen.
