OTTAWA – While some Canadians blame looser U.S. guns laws for the massacre that unfolded in Newtown, Conn. on Friday, one Canadian lawyer says gun control is not the place to look when trying to determine why this particular episode took place on the other side of the border.
A military-style, semi-automatic rifle called a Bushmaster AR-15 was used in the shooting deaths of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to police. The accused killer who killed himself, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, was also in possession of two handguns and a shotgun, authorities said.
Solomon Friedman, a criminal defence lawyer in Ottawa, said laws in Canada and Connecticut treat the AR-15 and handguns similarly. In both jurisdictions, they are considered “restricted,” meaning people can own them with a licence after completing a safety course and going through a background check for things such as a criminal record and mental health history, he said.
“Everyone following in the wake of any tragedy is going to be looking for some cure-all panacea,” he said. “Why do these things happen less in Canada than the United States? It’s not because these firearms are necessarily more tightly controlled.
“We see that no clearer than the fact that his happened in Connecticut. Connecticut is in the top five of what I would call the states with the most stringent gun control,” he said, adding California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois to that list.
There are some differences between Canadian and Connecticut gun laws, Friedman said. One is that a permit is required for transporting restricted firearms in Canada but not in Connecticut. But Friedman said he does not see this as something that would have prevented a mass shooting.
“I don’t see that as being a great public safety provision in that if you decide to go shoot up a school, you really don’t care that your transportation is contrary to law,” he said.
Friedman, who has expertise in gun laws, said he runs a comprehensive criminal defence practice, and represents people charged in gang shootings, "where these individuals never would have qualified for a firearms licence in the first place. Bad people want to do bad things; they find a way to do them.”
According to Statistics Canada, this country had a firearms homicide rate of 0.5 per 100,000 in 2011. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the rate in the U.S. in 2010 – the most recent data available – was 3.6, or more than seven times the most recent rate in Canada.
Friedman said each U.S. state has varying degrees of gun control but, in general, laws are looser in the U.S. in terms of what kinds of weapons people can have. And while Friedman did not dispute that the U.S. has a bigger problem with gun violence than other western countries, including Canada, he said gun laws are not necessarily the cause.
“We’ve been looking for a long time for a correlation between civilian gun ownership and gun crime . . . and it’s my understanding that the research has not borne out that type of correlation, that the correlation is with socioeconomic factors, with poverty, with mental health.”
He said the United States has more inequality and gang culture than other industrialized countries, and these are likely factors behind higher rates of gun violence there.
Tom Stamatakis, president of the Canadian Police Association, said differences in gun laws in Canada and the U.S. likely play a role in making shooting deaths more common on the American side of the border.
But gun culture in general in the U.S. – going beyond the specific scope of the law – is perhaps an even bigger part of the equation, he said.
“We’re not as accepting of firearms as Americans are,” he said. “I don’t think firearms are as much a part of our psyche, I guess, as they are in the States. They have the whole right-to-bear-arms piece, and the inclusion of the firearm in the fabric of their thinking is much stronger than it is in Canada.”
Francis Scarpaleggia, the federal Liberal party’s public safety critic, said: “It’s very hard to prove we didn’t have something like (the Connecticut shooting) because of our gun laws, but everything I know about our gun laws points in the direction of a system that makes this kind of situation less likely.”
Both Friedman and Stamatakis cited mental health as something to be considered when it comes to gun crimes. While neither could say whether this is any more of a problem in Canada than the U.S., Stamatakis said he’s encouraged by what he’s seen in Canada in recent years on this front.
“I certainly like to think Canada’s fairly progressive – more recently especially – when it comes to just being more aware and more willing to be more open around issues relating to mental health so that they can be properly managed or addressed,” he said.
– With files from AP
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