“When Mexico sends its people…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…”
(Donald Trump, presidential announcement speech, June 16, 2015)
The Washington Post gave Trump “Four Pinocchios” on this one:
Data on immigrants and crime are incomplete, but a range of studies show there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, first-generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans
The Post concluded:
It’s difficult to connect any crime with illegal immigration, by its nature. Drug smuggling and violent crimes do exist, but the cases are not indicative of larger trends in the immigrant population. What we do know about crime rates among non-citizens and inmates with unknown or unauthorized immigrant statuses show Trump’s assertions about a crime wave are not accurate.
However, we do have a serious problem at the border.
It is the problem of smuggled firearms, including high-powered handguns and semiautomatic and automatic weapons.
A problem that is “fueling bloodshed” and spurred a 16 percent increase in gun-related killings in 2014.
No, we are not talking about the U.S.-Mexico border, we are talking about the border with our friends to the north.
We are talking about smuggled firearms from the U.S. into Canada.
To be sure, Canada has a minuscule number of gun-related homicides a year, especially when compared to the United States.
William Marsden at the Post has the numbers:
Yet compared with the United States, the incidence of gun violence in Canada, which has a population of 35.2 million people, is almost minute. The latest figures, from 2014, show only 156 gun-related homicides in Canada compared with 10,945 in its more populous southern neighbor.
Even so, Canada has had its share of tragic gun killings, even mass shootings.
The worst one happened in 1989 in Montreal when Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 women and then himself at Ecole Polytechnique College in Montreal.
But, as Natasha Rudnick wrote in the wake of the October 2014 shooting in Canada’s halls of Parliament, “This isn’t supposed to happen in Canada.” She then explains “Why Canada’s gun culture is different – and why its shootings shock America.”
Still the most shocked by the gun violence — relatively “miniscule” as it may be — must be the Canadian people.
Part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s agenda is a promise to do everything to “get handguns and assault weapons off our streets,” by, according to Vice News, “amongst other things, bringing back regulatory paperwork required to transport certain types of weapons, kick in more money for anti-gang squads, increase background checks for gun purchases, and to increase regulations on gun vendors.”
Colbert King writes, “The United States is to Canada what Mexico is to the United States: the reason for border trouble. We get illegal immigrants smuggled from Mexico; Canada gets illegal guns smuggled from us,” and asks, “But who, pray tell, gets the worst of it?”
You decide.
Apparently, our neighbors to the north “fearful of the firearms smuggled from the United States, are planning to install devices at border stations to ‘detect and halt illegal guns.’”
This reminds me of Trump’s infamous proposal to build a YUGE, “beautiful” wall along our southern border to keep the alleged rapists and criminals out.
It may give Canadians some ideas, too — and who could blame them.
But wait, as a reader points out, Canadians are way ahead of us.
Nah, our good friends and neighbors to the north have plenty of common sense and comity.
So much comity and hospitality that they have invited Americans to move to Cape Breton Island if they decide to “get the hell out” of a — God prevent — Trump-run America.
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