Once upon a time, Canadian gun laws weren’t all that bad. Sure, they restricted some stuff more than the United States did, but who doesn’t? 

Since the Nova Scotia massacre, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “brown face” scandal, the Canadian government has been on a tear. They’ve restricted handguns heavily and banned so-called assault weapons. All in what they claim is an attempt to prevent violent crime.

And how well is it working?

Well, in Hamilton, Ontario, it doesn’t seem to be working any better than it does in Chicago.

Welcome to Dodge City!

Hamilton cops have made a slew of arrests and are hunting suspects in the explosion of shootings plaguing the city.

In a press release, cops say they’ve made five recent arrests in connection with the gunplay. So far, the HPS Shooting Response Team (SRT) has arrested 30 individuals and laid 196 charges in non-fatal shootings in the Hammer.

So far in 2024, there have been a record-shattering 54 shootings in the city.

“We cannot become complacent about gun violence in our city. We need people to speak up and speak out when they see something suspicious in their neighbourhoods,” Supt. Marty Schulenberg said in the release..

They then go on to list a whole bunch of these shooting incidents, including those where they’re still looking for a suspect.

But what gets me is that this is described as “record-shattering,” all while gun control has tightened in the country.

Hamilton isn’t a small town. It has a population of nearly 580,000 people. That’s larger than Baltimore or Milwaukee. So the fact that this is “record-shattering,” assuming that’s not hyperbole, suggests that this isn’t some tiny town where it doesn’t take much to be impressive. No, this is a large city, so there’s a deep enough pool that this means something.

Again, assuming it’s not just hyperbole.

However, again, Canada has tightened their gun restrictions significantly. They don’t believe that there’s a right to keep and bear arms. They don’t believe in a lot of rights, really–people have had to answer to the government over jokes, after all–but they really don’t believe that people have a right to have firearms.

So their passing gun control is a trivial matter, all things considered, and they’ve done it. They’ve even let Trudeau unilaterally declare an entire category of guns illegal and done nothing to really stop that.

And yet, Hamilton is seeing a “record-shattering” number of shootings.

If gun control works as advertised, how is that even possible?

The short answer is that it’s not. Some of the shootings are simple negligence, and those are never really going to be regulated away even if gun control managed to keep guns out of criminal hands.

No matter the city, nation, or anything else, the one thing that seems to unite everyone is that gun control doesn’t really work anywhere. While violent crime might not be the same in every place, there are a lot of other factors that play into that. But criminals still get guns no matter where you are or what you do. It’s as inevitable as death, taxes, or an anti-gunner politicizing a tragedy.