Canadian Cops Forced to Explain Why Shooter’s Guns Were Returned

Canada has cracked down extensively on guns in recent years, as we all have probably noticed. On Thursday, I wrote about all the gun control laws that completely and totally failed to stop the shooting, but I missed one.

It seems they have their own version of a red flag law on the books. That’s not really surprising, since they don’t see gun rights as actual rights anyway, but it appears that the killer in the Tumbler Ridge shooting had been “red-flagged.”

And he got his guns back, which the police up there are now trying to explain.

Questions are being raised about why guns confiscated from the home of the suspected killer in Tuesday’s Tumbler Ridge mass shooting were returned before the attack.

Those unanswered questions come as [killer’s name redacted] well-documented history of mental illness becomes more apparent—a history that included visits from police and a detention under the Mental Health Act.

Elenore Sturko, former RCMP officer and Independent MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, noted that when someone’s guns are confiscated, it is their “legal right then to make an application to have those firearms returned.”

“So for what reason they were returned, what arguments were made, who those firearms belonged to and whether or not they were the firearms used in this attack, those are questions that need to be answered,” she said.

Police have not revealed whether the guns retrieved from the scene are the same ones taken by police and then returned.

While the returned firearms were not linked to [the killer] directly and belonged to someone else in the household, gun control advocates say there are rules in place that can allow authorities to prevent guns being in a home in certain circumstance—including when there is a person dealing with mental illness.

“For me, it comes down to leadership, courage and erring on the side of public safety,” said Wendy Cukier, the president of the Coalition for Gun Control. “The laws are there. The discretion is there. The mechanisms are there. Maybe the resources need to be improved, but we have the tools—it’s whether or not we’re prepared to use them.”

Sure, the mechanisms are there, but they don’t actually stop massacres, now do they?

Look, the RCMP is going to catch a lot of blowback over this, but I kind of get it. The problem with red flag laws, regardless of what Canada might actually call them, is that it requires people to look at a person and to get the call right, and that’s a lot harder than you might think. After all, once someone deals enough with the mental healthcare system, they kind of figure out what they need to say to make it sound like they’re good to go.

It’s not exactly rocket science.

The mental health system only really works for people who want to get better, and even then, there are issues.

So, I get how they got this wrong. It’s also why a lot of mass killers in red-flag states don’t get red-flagged. None of their family actually thinks their loved one is a killer.

And that’s the problem, because a lot of other people who aren’t killers get hit because someone who knows them is irrational enough to think disagreement somehow means homicidal urges.

This time, as we’ve seen so many other times, it didn’t work, even after the killer had been red-flagged.

And it didn’t work in a country that doesn’t view gun rights as rights. Why would anyone think it would work here where we know better?

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