So today Mario, Brayden and I went to Silverdale and man it’s been a long time since I shot something!  Unfortunately the competition ranges are still closed but we had a good time none the less and I’m happy to report despite not firing a gun in months my skills didn’t really degrade. 🙂  In the steel target area, there’s a 2″ plate that I could reliably hit 8/10 from 10 yards but couldn’t do a perfect run.

After some pistol work, we went to the 25 meter range to shoot the ARs and man I do love my AR15s!

I brought along my camera and took these shots. Mario or Brayden took the pictures of me and they turned out pretty well I thought.

Looking forward to doing a class soon, getting rusty and could use the practice. 🙂

I’m glad politicians are looking beyond the tool that’s used to kill and actually want to deal with the issue of gang violence.

Saunders said, however, gang dynamics are complex and there’s no simple way to pinpoint the cause of the violence.

Some shootings, he said, are the result of gang-on-gang warfare, or someone acting on a personal grudge. And then there are deaths of innocent bystanders that get caught in the crossfire.

Taverner estimated of Toronto’s 363 shootings this year, almost 40 per cent occur in north Etobicoke. He said the area has a history of gang activity, turf wars and retaliation, and guns and drugs.
Source: CBC

I’m seeing a lot of good talk, about the city investing in after school programs for at risk youth, the governments of all levels talk about the needs to deter kids from joining gangs to begin with which is great. This will actually help with the issue of gun violence, more needs to be done of course and I’d suggest looking at our drug laws as the next step.  A ban on law abiding owners is simply window dressing that does not address the root causes of these problems.

So there was a “town hall” on gun control in Toronto yesterday, I would have liked to attend but was busy spending time with the family.  In any case I put quotations around town hall because from the people I know who went, the questions in the Q&A portion were screened before hand and the more poignant questions about the numbers were not addressed.

Mr. Blair, a former Toronto Police chief who spoke at Sunday’s event, has been tasked with stick-handling the handgun issue. He said that moving forward, “evidence” will help guide him. But at the town hall, even the evidence proved contentious.

As he sat onstage speaking, Mr. Blair cited Toronto Police figures indicating that an increasing proportion of guns used in crime are coming from domestic sources (as opposed to illegally through the border) – at least of those guns that police are able to track. That comment drew loud booing, with some shouting that the minister was misrepresenting the data.

Source: The Globe & Mail

Emphasis are mine & gun owners are upset because that’s a blatant lie and I illustrated that fact previously with actual Toronto police data which does not say that at all.

The video player embedding from CP24 doesn’t seem to work but how about listen to Louis March, founder of the Zero Gun violence group.

He gets it, banning guns is the easy (wrong) answer to the problem of gun violence, let’s tackle the root causes of gun crime.  Poverty and lack of opportunity often leads gangs and hence gang violence and how we solve this is difficult to answer.  How about a reinvestment in poorer areas which bring opportunity to the local populace so people are not struggling to feed their families?  Raise the minimum wage to a living wage, end the war drugs, let’s remove the money and power from these criminal elements.

Of course these are difficult issues to tackle, it’s easier to blame an inanimate object and call it evil.  As I mentioned to one commenter, homicides are committed at the same rate with knives as guns over a 5 year period (actually there are more stabbings, 939 vs 862 shooting homicides) but we don’t talk about banning knives right.  Let’s really do something rather than token gestures but that’s not sexy and will take more than 4 years so politicians are not interested.

So today I took my father in law and Maggie to the range (with the help from Mario) and they had a great time.  Maggie’s dad is I think 65 but for an old guy he handled himself pretty well.  I think he was disappointed that he didn’t shoot as well as he thought he could and I kept telling Maggie to translate that everyone sucks especially with pistols first time out.

I think it’s been a year since I got Maggie to come shooting and she had a good time too.  She’s pretty petite so normally she can’t handle much more than a .22 LR pistol or rifle but today she was trying out the 9mm HK SFP9 and did alright. It was pretty hot and everyone was tired around 11 so we packed up and went home.

In the afternoon Michael one of Brandon’s friend’s came over and played for a few hours, not really sure what they were doing but there was a lot of running and laughing so that’s good.  Tomorrow I’m driving to Chicago for a conference, I really hate airports (I don’t mind flying) so I’m going for a nice long drive which should be fun.  Packed everything including my SLR, will see if I can get some cool pictures when I’m not in the office.

Rest early tonight, long day ahead tomorrow. 🙂

So the perception in Toronto is that gun violence is up and local, federal and the Toronto police department have been parroting the same line, that 50% of guns used illegally are domestically sourced and it’s an absolute lie.

“Currently, there is no national repository for this type of information in Canada. The Canadian Firearms Program does not collect or track national statistics with regard to the origin of crime guns,” said Sgt. Marie Damian.

Source: CBC

The RCMP which manages the Canadian Firearms Program does not have any data on where guns are coming from whether from the US or from domestic sources.  Perhaps the local police department keeps track of this right?  Well here’s the information made available by a Dennis Young through a freedom of information request.

So if we look at the data last year there were 726 crime guns seized and of those, 67 could be traced to a licensed owner or ~9%.  So where is the 50% that the politicians and the Toronto Police keep saying?  Even the city’s own police department’s data doesn’t back this stat up…  Let’s take a look at the third chart as I find it the most interesting as ~50% of the guns seized are in the prohibited class (again it’s fairly consistent).  What’s most interesting is that as a legal owner with both my PAL & RPAL, I cannot purchase a prohibited class firearm.

In fact no one who’s received their license after 1996 can, only those who were in possession of those types of guns before the Firearms Act came into place can yet they account for 50% of all firearms seized in the last 10 years worth of data.  Don’t believe me, well download the report and take a look yourself.

Look obviously there’s an issue with gang violence and crimes committed by those who use firearms but let’s be frank it’s not someone like myself doing it.  To really tackle the root causes of these things requires a multifaceted approach (dealing with lack of opportunity, systemic racism, etc) and will require many years if not a generation to fix and that’s just not sexy for politicians.  They want a quick fix that can keep them in power 4 years from now and it’s not possible when dealing with such large societal problems but hey let’s blame legal owners, it’s an easy bait and switch.

So the Feds are talking about restricting gun ownership further, I get that it’s an easy way to score political points by going after legal gun owners, I just wish everyone would realize it wouldn’t have stopped the Danforth shooting last month.  The loser’s brother was a drug dealer and had associates who had a bunch of illegal guns, I still fail to see how more rules and regulations on legal owners would do anything.

The federal government has already said it would consider a number of different ways to crack down further on handguns, including empowering municipalities to do so – a commitment Blair reiterated this week.

He also cited measures already included in Bill C-71, which proposes to tighten certain regulations on gun ownership laws, including expanded background checks on would-be gun owners, stronger record-keeping by retailers and requiring buyers to first present a firearms licence.

Source: Global News

Neither of the above discussed items would have stopped the loser (I will call all mass shooters or terrorists this moving forward) from acquiring a gun.  If the government or us as a society want to deal with the problem with shootings we need to deal with the underlying issues, what is causing people to act out in a violent manner?

Of course those questions are much harder to answer and will take a lot longer, it’s just easier for those in charge to blame guns.