r/canadaguns • u/AutoModerator • Jun 06 '22

Weekly Politics Thread

Please post all your Politics or Ban-related ideas, initiatives, comments, suggestions, news articles, and recommendations in this thread. Unless new information is published in the media, recurring articles related to the gov'ts ***possible*** legislation are to be posted here. These threads will be weekly, until it's necessary for another per-week.

Previous politics threads can be found here. Previous threads can be found here.

We understand that politics is a touchy subject, and at times things can get heated. A reminder of the subreddit rules, when commenting, where subreddit users are expected to abide.

36 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

910 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/MasterMirr0r al Jun 09 '22

I have a friend who insists the stats show that the vast majority of mass shootings in Canada are from legal firearms.. this sounds suspect, to say the least. What are the actual stats?

12

u/Batsinvic888 Bats888 on YouTube Jun 09 '22

That stat may not be entirely in inaccurate if they are only talking about the random public mass shooting. However, it is an incredibly misleading stat because they are incredibly rare in Canada.

Since 2000 there have only been 2 public mass shooting. Since 1989 there have been 5.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '22

What do you define as a "public mass shooting" because pretty sure there's more then two. For example; Mayerthrope (this one may or may not meet the definition of public), Moncton, Dawson College (not many dead but a lot were injuried), Quebec City Mosque, and Nova Scotia. That's 5 since 2000, plus a few others like the guy who shot up parliament with a lever gun but those were limited in scale.

2

u/Batsinvic888 Bats888 on YouTube Jun 10 '22

I was going off of this list of massacres in Canada. They define it as

Massacre is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people or (less commonly) animals; carnage, butchery, slaughter in numbers"; it also states that the term is used "in the names of certain massacres of history".

I didn't include the Shedden one because it was gang related.

10

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '22

I don't have stats on me but that's 100% bullshit. Someone else can give you the raw data but afaik over 80% of gun crime in Canada is committed with illegal / smuggled handguns. The rest are stolen.

14

u/Whole_Sound_9538 Jun 10 '22

Licensed gun owners in Canada are 4x LESS likely to commit ANY crimes (including homicide) than the general public.

So statistically speaking, your friend is a lot more likely to go out and kill someone than you are.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '22

[deleted]

12

u/Afrozendouche Jun 10 '22

You have an uniniformed/misinformed friend. Tell them you would love to see those stats that they say show it. The onus is on them to prove their claim, not you to disprove it. Not that that matters to an idealogue or a zealot...

The bottom line is they won't be able to find any stats supporting their conclusion without taking US data. And we are not the US.

4

u/Scopequest Jun 09 '22

It may depend on what you mean by mass shooting. Do you include domestic violence? Do you include gang crime? Check out these lists and read the articles and see if they count to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_shootings_in_Canada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spree_shootings_in_Canada

11

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '22

That mass shootings page is incredibly misleading. I don't know of anyone who would consider a murder suicide a mass shooting let alone two gang members shot by another gang member.

5

u/Scopequest Jun 10 '22

Yep, that's part of my point. "Mass shooting" isn't defined and some people will twist it to what they want. I've heard as lose a definition (in the States) as an event where a shot is fired and 4 or more people are injured by any means.