your choice is to support a candidate that wants to restrict minority rights (what would de tocqueville say?) or a candidate that wants to repeal the second amendment, while acting as a sales agent for overseas arms purchases.
they're equally wrong. there's no good choice here. it's one form of right-wing extremism vs another form of it. neither approach remotely addresses any kind of remotely relevant issue - it just aimlessly pits one demographic against another.
it's divide and conquer.
then, you wonder why we have conspiracy theorists?
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-13/orlando-massacre-throws-twist-into-clinton-trump-battle
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i have very little love for guns. if i know there's a gun in a house, i won't go in it. but, we don't have a constitutional protection on arms up here, so we have different legal mechanisms. the point is just that i'm not opposed to gun control (even while recognizing the legal realities of the second amendment, and kind of insisting on the rule of law, as it applies to whatever country we're talking about). what i am opposed to is conflating the issues. not because i love guns - i really hate them - but because i know that's a dead-end to inaction (it's not just the gun lobby, it's the constitution) and a dead-end to effective policy (it's not going to work, anyways).
canada is a bad comparison, because we neither have a gun rights culture nor do we have as strict of a class hierarchy. so, you can say we have harsher gun control laws and be correct - but we also have more integrative social engineering policies. i'd suggest the latter is more important. although, note that we had an isis-inspired attack on parliament hill a few years ago, and have had less frequent mass shootings (there was one of historical importance in montreal in the 80s). we've also had massacres that use other weapons, like knives and explosives. but, you can twist the data around every which way and not real get anywhere with it.
i think france is a better example. france has some of the strongest gun control laws in the world, but it also has an incredibly poorly integrated migrant underclass as a consequence of it's history of colonialism in northern africa. so, you get these muslim ghettos full of algerians that face all kinds of barriers to full participation in society. the result is riots, gang violence - and, yes, mass shootings. if they had weaker gun control laws would it be worse? i dunno. but, i think it's pretty clear that the strict gun control laws haven't resolved anything. and, you wouldn't expect it to, because it's not the root cause of the issue.
again: i'm not opposed to gun control on it's face. background checks are a good idea. i don't see any value in buying an assault rifle. and etc. but, it's just disingenuous to think this is going to solve anything.
i'll predict the future. one day, the gun control advocates will get their way and launch a warn on guns. i don't want to say that nothing will change, because something did change with the war on drugs - black people ended up in jail on drug charges and white people didn't. that's what you're going to see with stricter gun laws: minorities will get arrested and whites won't. and twenty-thirty years later, you'll get a movement to stop the war on guns. meanwhile, another generation will pass that is just that much more damaged by a culture of gun violence.
a lot of people are pointing fingers at religion and patriarchy and the media and the political class and i have no argument against it, it's just that i'd like to see more attention pushed towards the war economy. that's primarily what i was getting at when i blamed the culture. we're constantly being drummed up for war. we glorify violence. not just at the military level, either, but at the police level, too. when you live in a society that glorifies violence, one should not be surprised when it manifests itself in daily life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4MC0vZgwfM
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i don't have the background required to fact check any of this, but it makes a lot of sense to me. so, when you hear a barely reformed dixiecrat like clinton make this the center of her platform, just a few decades after her husband used criminal justice reform for the same purposes.....
the choices are terrible. i have to tune out. i'm going to drive myself mad. or potentially get shot, myself.
https://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html
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http://www.salon.com/2015/06/24/gun_controls_racist_reality_the_liberal_argument_against_giving_police_more_power/