The US Is to Canada What Mexico Is to the US - the Reason for Border Trouble Colbert I. King - The Washington Post
go to original February 21, 2016

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hugs a resident in La Loche, Saskatchewan, where a 17-year-old was charged with killing four people and wounding seven in a mass shooting. (Jonathan Hayward/Reuters)

Much is made about the impact of illegal immigration on states along the southern U.S. border. But what about the impact of illegal weapons making their way into the country to the north?

Smuggled firearms from the United States are fueling bloodshed in Canada. A couple of sentences from a story in The Post this week by William Marsden said it all: “Homicides in Toronto spiked to 80 in 2005, from 64 in 2004, and the majority were shooting-related. About 70 percent of the guns used were handguns and automatic weapons smuggled from the United States, police say.”

While the number of shootings has decreased, gun seizures by the Canadian Border Services Agency reportedly are up: 226 illegal weapons were seized in 2012, most of them handguns; there were 316 by 2015.

To be sure, our own gun-violence numbers swamp Canada’s: There were 156 gun-related homicides in Canada in 2014, Marsden reported, compared with 10,945 the same year here. That may be cold comfort to Canadians, who experienced a 16 percent increase in gun-related killings in 2014.

Alarmed by the increased number of high-powered handguns and semiautomatic and automatic weapons in his cities, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau indicated that he will seek tougher laws that would “get handguns and assault weapons off our streets.”

Read the rest at The Washington Post

Related: Should Canada Build a Wall, Too? (The Moderate Voice)

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