Tumbler Ridge Shooting Highlights How Gun Control Arguments Always Play Out

On Sunday, we published a piece involving my response to a Canadian student op-ed that took issue with Americans “pouncing” on how gun control failed in the Tumbler Ridge shooting in Canada. I found the irony of this palpable, since the author somehow figures it’s terrible that we use a horrific incident to make our points when they do it all the time.

Now, this is Canada, so we don’t have a say in their politics, but it’s useful to look at things up that way because, frankly, bad ideas rarely stay put. Instead, they end up acting like a virus and spread throughout the land.

And Canada is way too close for that not to happen.

But while Canadians are lashing out because we “pounced,” their domestic anti-gunners were doing just as much, and in a more disgusting fashion, which some in the Great White North are pouncing on themselves.

As the dust settles after the horrific mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, the politicization of an event that resulted in the deaths of eight innocent people by gun control advocates is not just untimely but an attempt to shift the blame and narrative of this tragedy.

This politicization is inappropriate and distracts from what should be the real focus: warning signs that were missed.

Gun control advocates like Wendy Cukier, the president of the Coalition for Gun Control, have been quick to use the shooting as an opportunity to push narratives against gun owners.

“Strong gun laws and strong implementation of those gun laws do have an impact on levels of violence,” she said in her opening remarks while being interviewed on CTV News just two days after the shooting.

“There is no right to own guns in this country,” she continued.

This kind of rhetoric might be common in a normal situation, but raising it within 48 hours of a mass shooting risks overshadowing the victims, all while the facts are still emerging.

Cukier is not the only one who’s taken this position; one scroll on Twitter, and countless posts are drawing a line between Tuesday’s tragedy and the broader gun control debate.

But writer Jackson Loy, who documented the above, also has the right idea of things.

See, he figures he knows who and what is to blame.

This shift of focus also equates to a shift of blame; instead of the blame being, correctly, on the individual who pulled the trigger, the blame shifts to perceived inadequacies with gun regulations.

When a crime can be blamed on a system, rather than an individual, accountability becomes fuzzy, and the commentary shifts from justice for victims to a debate over reforms.

This murkiness over blame can also be attributed to the fact that the shooter is dead. You cannot make a corpse stand trial, and therefore, people, hungry for something living to transfer culpability to, look for a substitute defendant in the court of public opinion.

The shooter, alive or dead, is the cause of this tragedy, full stop.

Bingo.

The person responsible is always the killer himself.

Now, is it fair to discuss the environment that might have led to the killing? Absolutely. It’s worth understanding whether there were mental health issues, violent rhetoric, or, yes, even permissive laws that may have contributed. That last is rarely the issue, mind you, but it’s fine to have that discussion to some degree.

But the problem is and always will be that some jackwagon decided the way to deal with whatever demons were in his or her head is to go out and kill a bunch of innocent people just because they can.

And when one person is griping that people on this side of the border are pointing out that the laws failed, you don’t get to escape criticism for being a complete moron when your own side is doing literally the same thing on their end. Worse, though, we have no impact on Canadian gun laws. Cukier is an advocate who gets listened to by Canadian politicians.

She has a say, and her latching on is more problematic.

The thing is, regardless of which side of the 49th Parallel you’re on, we often see this uneven approach. Gun control advocates get free rein to discuss gun control as a solution. They often start before the bodies are even cold, sometimes while the shooting is even ongoing, and no one in the media bats an eye. It’s just a normal conversation in their eyes.

But when someone on this side of the debate gets involved, well, that’s a bridge too far.

In his “documentary” Bowling for Columbine, anti-gunner Michael Moore does just that, criticizing the NRA for hosting an event in a city that had just seen a gun-related tragedy. However, he never once criticizes a single anti-gun group for doing anything similar in the aftermath of some high-profile shooting.

Not once.

That’s because the media tends to engage in a double standard on guns. This is how it plays out, no matter where you are. The only difference is, as Cukier noted herself, we have a right to keep and bear arms. Canadians do too, mind you, but we at least have a constitution that acknowledges it, which means we have a layer of protection they don’t have.

But we will see this play out time and time again, and not a drop of irony will be noted by the anti-gun side.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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