Anyone who reads my blog regularly (not many lol) knows that generally I’m pretty left on most issues but turn hard right when it comes to guns because my underlying belief is that people should be able to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t affect others. That’s why I’m for legalization of drugs (it’ll happen sooner than later), when I told people that’s how I felt 10-15 years ago, they were aghast but look at society now, we’re moving in that direction. That’s not the discussion point today though, I shoot guns as a hobby (though I haven’t shot much recently) and the federal Liberal government has come out with more laws in the hope of stopping mass shootings and lower gun violence. People who perpetrate those types of crimes do not care about laws and it’s been the Liberal MO since I was a kid, something bad happens with a gun, more gun laws which I get because at first glance it looks good but it’s all smoke and mirrors because it actually does nothing but placate the people.
I’m also not simply against more gun laws, I do want to deal with the issue of gun violence and have said previously what I think would help actually reduce violence. The Star posted an article which I mirrors much of what I personally think about how we can address gun violence and here are a few excerpts.
“Many of these kids that are committing all these murders, these are Harris’s children, because they were five and six years old (at the time of the 1995 election), and these were the kids that got neglected,” LaRose told me.
Forever nattily dressed in a suit, dress shirt, tie and flat cap, LaRose stressed in that “Year of the Gun” in 2005 that governments of all levels needed to invest in the next generation of kids who were five, six and seven years old, and their families, to improve lives, provide opportunities, create meaningful jobs, improve education and health outcomes, tackle systemic racism and reduce violent crime.
There are many solutions to violent crime that have nothing to do with police — lessons already learned about supporting families and youth, and yet politicians have largely failed to act on the knowledge in meaningful, long-term ways.
At the time, I quoted from Stephen Lewis’s 1992 report on racism in Ontario: “It is Black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is Black students who are being inappropriately streamed in schools, it is Black kids who are disproportionately dropping out, it is housing communities with large concentrations of Black residents where the sense of vulnerability and disadvantage is most acute, it is Black employees, professional and non-professional, on whom the doors of upward equity slam shut,” wrote Lewis.
Invest early in terms of education, child supports, health, daycare — try holistic approaches to decrease poverty and disparate outcomes for Black, Indigenous and other racialized groups — and you’ll not only improve lives, but you’ll also save money. On health care, on police, on courts, on jails.
Williams worked at Centennial College, for minimum wage, paid for by the government. It was get up every morning and do a straight-up 9-to-5, get a paycheque every two weeks. For Williams, it was a “formative” experience.
“It was a pretty powerful means of incentivizing the hiring of youth, the racialized youth who otherwise would have been going the full 10 weeks (of summer) with nothing,” Williams said in an interview.
“I don’t know the degree to which that had sort of a suppressive effect on criminal activity, but I do know a number of people who said that was the first opportunity in their lives to build up a resume, and once you start getting a few good entries on a resume, you do that two or three years and it’s all the references, and all of the positive spinoffs that flow from them,” said Williams.
Source: The Star
It’s definitely a lot to take in but politicians keep doing the same thing. We really need to listen to the people who live this life and hear what they think are the solutions because governments have been doing the same thing over and over since I was born and it’s not working! I really wish people would demand politicians stop with the easy answers, it took decades to get us into the position we’re in, it could take us decades to get out of it but we need do something else.
Perhaps that’s why it irks me so much when Trudeau talks, I get with COVID he needs to reassure Canadians but no, most of the time quick government action will do little to address the issues that affect people the most. That’s not within their power, they can however foster the environment where we can move to a better tomorrow safely, if we as a society choose it.
