1) Ease of smuggling doesn't make it easy nor easier than having a large domestic supply to steal and move, unhindered by regulation. Smuggling is costly and risky, which means the black market value of those firearms goes up dramatically. Higher cost means more difficult access.
It's not in evidence that there's a "large domestic supply" of the guns that have been banned. 80,000 AR-15 type rifles in Canada might sound like a lot, but in a country of 37 million people, finding a house that has one and breaking in and stealing it might be like finding a needle in a haystack. And movement of guns is certainly not unhindered by regulation in Canada. If you buy a restricted gun and you sell it to somebody who isn't allowed to have it, you're going to prison.
As you point out in point #2, this measure is aimed toward mass shooting events, not the kind of gang-related shootings that constitute most of Canada's gun violence. And as you point out to Coonlight in your later post:
I mean, I'm sure there's some population level relationship between poverty and gun crimes, but mass shooting events seem to be largely perpetrated by people who are neither uneducated nor living in severe poverty.So, it seems to me that whether this nudges up the street price of an AR-15 a few bucks doesn't really matter much.
2) Yes the majority of "gun violence" in general does involve handguns, so are you advocating we have stricter regulations on those? Because I'm all for it. However, I doubt that's what you're implying. So what we're talking about here isn't general "gun violence" nor is that why this legislation was created. This legislation was created to make it more difficult to carry out mass murders. Those rarely involve handguns.
I'm not sure that's true. While the headline grabbing incidents may use long guns, I am not sure that's the case in general. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the Surrey Six shooting was carried out with a handgun. Toronto's Danforth shooting was carried out with a handgun. It's quite possible that the first crime scene of Gabriel Wortman's rampage (where he shot 6 people at the house party he had left then returned to) was carried out with a handgun (but they won't tell us for sure).
But even if it's supportable to claim that mass murders most commonly use an "assault style rifle", that's hardly a prerequisite. Somebody who has fantasies about killing a whole bunch of people might think "I was going to use an AR-15, but now I can't get one so the plan is off" but instead he's probably thinking "I can't get an AR-15 so I'll find an alternative." An alternative might be a handgun in each pocket, it might be some other gun that's suitable for shooting people, or it might be a rental van.
Two things:
3) Lastly, we're never going to have an "all or nothing" solution, which is the implied solution in your arguments. The government can only mitigate harm and the steps they're taking are designed to make it markedly more difficult to get the weapons that have been used in mass murders. They can never and will never be able to make it absolutely impossible.
There's never going to be a 100% successful solution, but the measures we have in place already work extremely well. Canada's existing measures already mitigate harm to an exceptional degree. There's no perfect solution, but less than two hundred gun homicides per year in a country of 37 million people has to be regarded as tremendously successful.
-k