There Must Be No More 'Thoughts And Prayers'

École Polytechnique, Dunblane, Columbine, Sandy Hook, and so many others in so many places over so many years, with Tumbler Ridge now joining this infamous list.

School shootings are often seen as a tragedy, as a horrible thing that just happens, with no underlying causes or means of prevention. In the US, they are regularly met with expressions of ‘thoughts and prayers’ — followed by concerted campaigns by the firearms industry to dissociate their weapons from their outcomes.

Canada is fortunate in that this is not so regular an occurrence that we could describe what our ‘regular’ reaction would be. What we do know is that the Prime Minister’s response was visceral; contained, but visibly emotional.

Carney is not a talker, he is a doer. We can expect that, over the next weeks and months, that raw emotion will turn into effective action.

The current gun buy-back program is meeting high resistance across the country with departments and whole provinces refusing to participate. It may get hundreds or even thousands of guns off our streets, but it won’t get a lot of the ones that need to come off. As a result, it may not be an especially effective solution. Banning “assault-style” firearms is too subjective, as plenty of weapons are capable of such assault without looking the part. The long-gun registry was politicised to the point that the Harper government’s destruction of the program was a political win for him that could never properly be reversed, leaving the Conservative party rather than the RCMP with the largest database of gun owners in the country.

In Britain, the Dunblane massacre caused a serious, nationwide effort to address the country’s gun violence. There has not been a major school shooting in the 30 years since.

In Australia, the Port Arthur massacre just a few weeks earlier had a similar effect, with no large-scale mass-casualty shootings until last year’s Bondi Beach Shooting.

The trouble with Canada’s attempts at gun control, particularly following the Montreal Massacre at the École Polytechnique which preceded Dunblane and Port Arthur is that those efforts have largely been seen to be performative rather than effective, in their effort to balance the fact that in a vast, rural country like Canada, guns have widespread legitimate uses that are conflated in debate with equally widespread illegitimate uses.

There are wider challenges that we have not risen to as a country that prevent us from meaningfully resolving this one.

In rural Canada, interaction with the government at all levels is very limited. There are few visible public services besides roads, plows, and garbage collection, none of which are federal. There is no public transit. Telecommunications infrastructure is often spotty, expensive, and unreliable. Healthcare is often far away and difficult to access. Emergency service response time, often staffed by volunteers, can be measured in tens of minutes to hours.

Residents are often responsible for their own drinking water and waste-water, expected to pay tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket to keep their septic systems up to code. A significant portion of rural households have firearms whether for hunting or protecting livestock from predators. They are next to the shovels and rakes, just another tool in the shed.

All of this is so far outside the experience of those who have only lived in urban Canada, where privately owned guns serve no legitimate purpose and do not belong, while government services are constantly in your face, as to be completely incomprehensible.

Many people in these communities have only two major interactions that they identify with the federal government: income tax and gun control. It is in that context that gun control becomes politically charged and difficult to achieve.

Progressives Lack Ambition

It is easy for politicians to exploit the feeling among rural voters that the only purpose of their federal taxes is to pay for the police to come for their guns, as part of a division with an urban ‘elite’ that cannot understand them. With that fundamental ‘truth’ understood, it is easy to believe the other divisive ideas sold by the politicians exploiting this national weakness, amplified by unregulated social media.

The result is a feeling that rural Canadians pay the price for urban problems. Proposed gun control is not itself the problem, even in the deepest corners of rural Canada. Registering, regulating, and controlling firearms would be apolitical and non-controversial if rural Canadians felt that the federal government were always on their side in other matters of importance, investing in their future, not only that of the big cities.

The federal government will easily spend more on a public transit system for a single big city than on reliable high speed Internet infrastructure for the entire country’s rural population. We will build a dedicated passenger rail corridor between major urban centres, expropriating rural lands as we pass with wanton disregard for who or what is already there.

The infrastructure may be essential to our development as a country, but the impact to rural Canada is to once again pay the price for urban development with no on-going benefit to the bisected and expropriated communities in which the infrastructure must pass. Small towns may not even, by the very definition of high speed rail, get the singular benefit of a station stop along those lines.

The Ghost of Mirabel and the Billion-Dollar Gamble

Thus the problem with addressing gun control is not the direct policy objectives of controlling the access to and safety of our firearms, it is that we lack the wider ambition to make guns one part of a much broader national conversation.

Unlike the United Kingdom and Australia, we share a border with a country that exists on the fundamental principle embedded straight in their constitution that citizens may be armed. The provision, known as the second amendment, is a single sentence:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Their country seems to have entirely missed the purpose of the amendment in light of a government and movement systematically destroying the security and freedom of their state, but Canada is nevertheless adjacent to an awful lot of guns. Some estimates show as many as 90% of the guns used in violent crime in Canada come from the United States. Never mind Trump’s imaginary fentanyl flows from Canada to the United States for which US DEA’s analysis does not even mention Canada — we should perhaps impose tariffs on the United States until they deal with this border problem that actually threatens the lives of Canadians.

Our national inability to satisfactorily address gun control, which could reduce the risk and severity of incidents has a lot of factors and is not an easy nut to crack, but it has not been a total failure. The October 22, 2014, shooting on Parliament Hill that took the life of Corporal Nathan Cirillo was limited in large part by the shooter’s inability to get access to an appropriate weapon for his deadly mission.

But if we focus only on gun control, we won’t solve the underlying social problems.

The RCMP were careful to avoid saying much about the suspect in Tuesday’s shooting until the following day. Then they announced that she was a trans woman who was born male and had started her transition approximately six years ago, who they suggested had mental health concerns.

Conservatives Escalate False Claims of ‘Trans Violence,’ Declare All Trans People ‘Dangerous and Unstable’ Following News of a Trans Suspect in Deadly Canadian Shooting

That inevitable release of that information will lead to assumptions about the attacker and her motivations. We don’t know exactly what happened in this case, and we may never know all the details, but we do know the resulting confirmation bias we will quickly see in the anti-trans misinformation world. It will distract from the very real human tragedy at a school in a small town where every family will be impacted in some way as too many bury their children.

When the federal government gets past the initial emotional shock of the moment and faces the introspection needed, the whole idea of limiting our follow-up to American-style ‘thoughts and prayers’ will cause raging internal anger and drive our doer-led cabinet to take concrete action.

That real action will have to take place, not only on the access to the guns that allowed it to happen, but on the social and political divisions, hopelessness, bullying, illnesses, social media amplification, or other problems that contribute to these types of events, whether or not each factor contributed to this particular incident.

It will be time to dramatically improve universal access to physical and mental health care.

It will be time to support our rural communities with the same fervour and investment as our urban communities to break both the perceived and real inequality that drives much of our political division.

It will be time to deal head-on with the misinformation campaigns that allow collective bullying of different minorities.

It will be time to undo the online news act which has seriously harmed Canadians’ access to factual information, and to deal with algorithms that profit off of our differences and disagreements.

It will be time to address an oligarchy that benefits from the rest of us arguing amongst ourselves, and in so doing address the increasingly egregious wealth disparity between our richest and our poorest.

It will be time to pay our educators and health care workers as well as our police officers.

It will be time to address how to make schools and public spaces physically safer without having to resort to the bulletproof backpacks and classrooms of our southern neighbours, whose president has conspicuously not expressed his sympathy to Canada over the deaths of so many of our children.

The moment has finally arrived, where even the most gun-ho politicians on this side of the border understand the moment, that will allow the honest public discourse needed on the whole package, including the part about the guns.

We must, however, act quickly, and show Canadians that we are ready for the hard conversations and decisions needed. This moment will not last if it appears to have devolved into yet another round of thoughts and prayers.