Last week Paul Martin announced his plan to ban handguns. Well this’ll certainly solve all of our problems, won’t it? We all know the majority of gun crime is cause by regular people who legally buy guns, and once banned, the police can easily confiscate all the weapons which could be used in crimes. Problem solved, right? Yea sure.

What I don’t understand is how this Liberal promise even sounds reasonable to anyone. I saw people interviewed and the majority support it like it’ll actually do something to combat gun crime. The part that mystifies me the most is how many people seem to disengage their brains and agree when the politicians make the connection between banning the legal position of guns and the reduction of gun crimes with illegal weapons. I’ll grant you that some guns are stolen from people who’ve purchased them legally, but unless you’ve got some numbers to back yourself up, I doubt those stolen guns would make up even 10% of the illegal weapons used in gun crimes.

I read that of the seventy-odd murders this year in Toronto, fifty involved the use of a handgun. Whatever reporter wrote the story was asleep at the switch because it’s pretty important to know how many of those fifty hand guns were legally purchased and registered. If the number is as low as I suspect it is, the Liberal plan is worse than useless.

I admit I think guns are beautifully simple and elegant devices in the way they work, but I am not a gun lover, nor do I have a gun. I’ve never even seen one in person that wasn’t strapped to the hip of a police officer. Still, I don’t see how banning the legal ownership of hand guns does anything but take guns out of the hands of the law-respecting gun owner who went through the proper procedure to legally purchase and own a gun. There’s a big difference between banning guns and making sure criminals don’t have them. The sooner people wake up and understand the difference, the better off we’ll all be. If the politicians can so easily get votes by spooning these simple logical fallacies, we’ll be more lost than we already are.

So, I expect we’ll be more lost than we already are.