The contemporary Left is perfectly comfortable in the belief that it has the right to “engineer” the behaviour of the “populist” masses, that vast majority of citizens who have neither the education or wisdom of our “progressive” elites. That this assumption entails disdain for what used to be considered the fundamental principles of a Democracy, is apparently irrelevant. Defend a politically incorrect belief, say the wrong thing, and the Left feels entitled to “cancel” you. Free speech be damned! Unfortunately such tactics have little impact on the real driving force of the human dynamic, the Moral-Intellectual status of the Individual. While the mandates of D.E.I., for example, are sacred to the Left, many of those who profit from them may be utterly undeserving, self-centered jerks whose only concern is their own success. This is to say that the statistical adjustments wrought by our social engineers, while seemingly reflecting a move towards social justice, are mere superficial changes rooted in considerations of Race, Gender, etc., which have Nothing to do with Human Merit, Intelligence and Integrity. Nowhere is the superficiality of the Left more apparent than in its efforts in various jurisdictions to stifle gun violence by simply restricting the availability of guns to the general public.
While Canada’s Globe and Mail generally slants to the Left, on July 5 it published a wonderful article by Robyn Urback outlining the futility of Justine Trudeau’s efforts to stifle gun violence in Canada by denying ownership of certain weapons to the law-abiding public. It was a horrific mass killing in Nova Scotia in 2020, she suggests, that inspired the initiative. Ironically, however, the murderer in question was Not a legally registered gun owner. Indeed, Urback says, Statistics Canada reported that 91% of those who committed murder in 2023 were not validly licensed to own a gun. So it seems that laws designed to remove weapons from the hands of law-abiding citizens are utterly futile in that those committing the crimes have no respect for the Law whatsoever.
With typical government incompetence, Urback points out, Trudeau’s program, while having cost taxpayers over 67 million dollars by 2024, had not yet actually removed a single gun from the hands of legal owners. On the positive side, over 12,000 of the targeted weapons had been removed from commercial outlets set to sell them. The next step planned by Carney’s Liberals, apparently, is the establishment of “drop-off depots” which have been quite successful in New Zealand in reducing the number of guns in the hands of the general public there. And yet, Urback says, gun violence in that country has continued to rise!
The point of her article would seem to be that governments simply cannot legislate human morality. What they can do, of course, is remove the mentally ill and criminally inclined from our streets. Yet on this issue our “enlightened progressives” have again failed miserably, a significant portion of the violence they so abhor committed by those who have been released on bail again and again, in some cases dozens of times. To “conservatives,” for whom Law and Order ought to be the primary concern of all governments, the building of adequate numbers of prisons and mental institutions would seem to be a fundamental priority. For Justine Trudeau, the answer to the ever increasing violence in our streets was the confiscation of weapons from law-abiding Canadians, a project on which he had spent over 76 million dollars by 2024 with no positive results whatsoever.