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While Canada certainly has fewer guns per capita than the US, we still have lots. AR-15s specifically are slightly hard to come by, especially since the most recent push -- but anyone who wants one can certainly have a black scary semiauto .223 of some stripe.
This seems sufficient for mass shootings, regardless of how many more guns are floating around the US? Like, you can really only shoot one at a time.
Sure... if they're willing to wait an entire year for the license that takes a weekend, 400 bucks, and (for Restricted) knowing 2 people who'll vouch for you to obtain.
And by and large, this system works. It will still get you killed if you need a gun right now (the archetypical example of this is a stalker who isn't obeying their restraining order; angry exes kill families quite a lot and cops can't be everywhere), but even that isn't a design problem and has more to do with its implementation.
This is the "compromise" position, and if approached in good faith it works exceptionally well specifically because it keeps guns out of the hands of the poor, the stupid, and the friendless- all traits associated with criminality (European citizens are fine with this approach; the US' system of
wokenessconsidering everyone trustworthy until proven otherwise is specifically a reaction to this!). True, existing socially-vetted owners can still become insane later, but the compromise is specifically "we prove ourselves to you, and in return you treat the people who do get through with a 'forgone conclusion, they would have just used a truck or fire instead' attitude (and as such don't launch a bunch of legislation to punish everyone else)", and by and large that works. Most European countries have more liberal gun laws than blue US states (and British Commonwealth states) do as a result- and the most liberal ones were occupied by the Soviets or on their border.This position can't be reached in the US (and to a significant degree, the government couldn't enforce it even if they wanted to- everyone owns property and there's just too much ground to cover to stop illicit manufacturing), so you end up with a bunch of patches on symptoms like "high capacity mags" and "assault weapons" even though a single-shot shotgun and a .22 is all you need to perpetrate a mass shooting (which is how it happens in the UK). They then proceed to export this solution around the world; which is why the populations of countries closest to the American orbit (Aus, UK, NZ, CA) had licensing schemes and population tolerance thereof that were subsequently completely destroyed (the compromise that was licensing can no longer exist because the population is now too Americanized to tolerate it). For example, NZ was the freest former English colony in terms of gun law, but the population's ability to compromise had been hollowed out by exposure to American culture war until an Australian national came along and shattered it. Canada is more complicated, because it's close enough to the US that the concept of high-trust high-freedom leaks through more, but also lacks the political safeguards to keep that part of the nation safe from its largest cities that the US does... so the rest of the country (culturally closer to the red part of the US) suffers.
How many American mass shooters would have been unable to manage this in advance? It's not like these are spur of the moment events. Anyways if you are poor(ish) and/or stupid, the black market remains an option.
While the situation is not as clearcut as in the US, my guess is that there's very little the government in either place could actually do that would make a difference to mass shootings -- an analysis of what percentage of American mass shooters would have been able to complete a PAL by hook or by crook (you don't actually need an RPAL to get a scary-looking 223 with 5/30 mags that are trivially de-neutered, either) would be fairly interesting.
That is an interesting one. There's a lot of friendless mass shooters that wouldn't have been able to get two people to vouch for them. On the other hand, some of those guys used guns that were owned by relatives. Ballpark? Maybe a quarter of mass shooters wouldn't have been able to fulfill those criteria.
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