Man With Guns Uses Ax Funny Video Facebook
Matt Gurney: I'm a gun owner, but this is one way we need tougher laws
Corey Lewis was a textbook example of someone who shouldn't have been allowed to own a gun. He had known mental health issues, and was known to be violent. And yet he owned five on the day he threatened police
On July 17, 2010, Corey Lewis, 39, of Okotoks, Alta., assaulted his wife and stepson. They fled the home and alerted police, warning the responding officers that Lewis possessed firearms and ammunition. After the first officers to respond encountered a shotgun-wielding Lewis, a tactical unit was called in. A member of that unit, armed with an M16 rifle, killed Lewis early the next morning, after he stepped outside the home holding what appeared to be a firearm and pointed it at the officers.
It wasn't a firearm — it was a dark umbrella. But don't blame the police. A note found on Lewis's body, which said, among other things, "Take my life" and "I have crossed over to the other side," made it clear that this was suicide-by-cop. It was a horrible ending to a family tragedy, that, more than five years later, is back in the news thanks to a newly released fatality inquiry by Alberta judge Marlene Graham.
Justice Graham's report, among other issues, investigated how Lewis was able to have legally obtained firearms — five of them, to be exact. Because that shouldn't have happened. As documented in her report, Lewis had a long history of domestic problems and mental health crises. He was known to be abusive to his family, he was known to suffer from severe bouts of depression, he was known to have experienced periods of "suicidal ideation" — of wanting to kill himself. How did this guy get guns?
I'm not a gun control fanatic. Indeed, I'm a vanishingly rare sort — a white collar Torontonian who owns and uses guns. I've worked my way through the convoluted mess that is the Canadian gun control apparatus. I banged my head against the disaster of the long-gun registry (those experiences have been recounted here in columns previously, but suffice it to say, any faith one could hold in the registry as an effective public safety or law enforcement tool did not long survive any contact with the people running it).
Long story short, I'm the last kind of guy to reflexively call for more, stronger gun control measures when something bad happens. We live in a country where millions of people own guns and gun crime is astonishingly rare. The system, in general, works. Cracking down on target shooters, collectors and hunters won't do much more — anything, really — to make Canada safer.
But it's because I'm a gun owner, and would like to remain one, that I find the story of Corey Lewis so disturbing. I spent years arguing that the long gun registry could be scrapped without impacting public safety specifically because Canadians weren't protected by the registry, but by the licensing provisions of our gun control system. Most Canadians know little of guns and less of our gun control laws, so the distinction was often lost on them, but in short, the registry may have tracked where a gun was, but the licences control who's allowed to own them in the first place. From a public safety perspective, the latter is the only thing that really matters. If you get the licensing part right, the registry is superfluous.
But you have to get the licensing part right. The entire point of a gun control system — well, a coherent, well-thought out one, which arguably isn't ours, alas — is making sure the wrong people don't get guns. The two categories of "wrong people" that basically everyone agrees shouldn't own guns are the violent and the mentally ill.
Lewis was approved for a restricted-class firearms licence. That's horrifying
Lewis was both. Though he had no criminal record, he had had an emergency protection order placed against him previously due to domestic violence (a criminal conviction was avoided through mediation and Lewis agreeing to take medication and therapy). His mental health struggles are similarly a matter of record. Background checks and screening are supposed to be part of every applications for a firearms licence, and yet, Lewis was approved for a restricted-class (handguns and certain rifles) firearms licence. That's horrifying.
What's still more horrifying is that Lewis had honestly and faithfully filled out the paperwork. Justice Graham pulled his application form and reviewed it, and found that Lewis had honestly answered yes when asked whether he'd suffered from mental health issues during the last five years, if he'd been reported to the police or social services for violence, and if he'd been subject of a protection order. Calls were made to character references who said they foresaw no issues, Lewis's widow also said she foresaw no problems. That was about the extent of the screening, in part, Justice Graham heard from a firearms officer in Alberta, out of concern for Lewis's privacy.
You can fault the friends who vouched for him or the widow or not having said more when she had the chance. But you can't blame them for the ultimate tragedy — that's on the system. Lewis was a textbook case of someone who should never have been able to legally buy guns, where the evidence was public record and where he was even honest about his history. Any gun control system that can't weed out a guy like this isn't working.
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I've no real enthusiasm for the notion of deeper, more intrusive background checks for gun owners, especially because I'll be renewing my own licence in a few years, under a federal government that gun owners expect to be less friendly toward them than the last. But there are times when an application should be scrutinized very, very carefully — and this is one of them.
Canada seems to have reached an uneasy truce when it comes to gun control politics — law-abiding citizens in good mental health will be allowed to own and use their guns, including handguns, if they consent to a system that is annoying, wasteful, often misguided … but sorta, mostly works. Incidents like this, or ones that end even more tragically — when the system fails — are exactly the kind of thing that catch the eyes of politicians looking to do a little grandstanding at the expense of lawful gun owners. Canadians should expect a system that functions better than it did in the case of Corey Lewis, and gun owners should be the ones demanding it most.
National Post
mgurney@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney
Matt Gurney is a columnist for, and editor of, the National Post Comment section. He hosts National Post Radio every weekday morning from six until nine Eastern on Canada Talks, channel 167.
Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/0106-ed-gurney
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