brendon444, that's alot of info you posted there. I'm not going to go through all of it, as part of me thinks you're trolling and I don't want to waste my time, but on the odd chance you aren't, lets go through a few of your statements:
1-Straight from
StatsCanada "Firearms are present in a relatively small proportion of all police-reported violent crime in reporting provinces and territories". Of this "small proportion", approx. 57% involved a handgun. So just over half of a "small proportion", this does not equate to alot of violence in my mind;
2-Yup, they are smaller than long guns, easy to acquire though?
3- "it is clear from available data that when a firearm is used in a suicide attempt in Canada, it generally tends to be a long gun"
Link
4- With 266 homicides in 2017 involving a firearm, I don't believe we have either.
5- Your numbers seem way, way off. A million deaths due to firearms over a 57 year period equates to approx. 17,545 deaths per year. For reference, in 2016, there were approx. 891 suicides/homicides where a firearm was involved, in Canada. You think that number has decreased 20x with an increasing population?
Etc., you really lost me at "firearms population of some 190 million". Current estimates peg the number of firearms in Canada at around 10 million. I also noticed you included suicide in all your numbers, which seems odd to me, as they are likely included for no other reason other than to inflate your numbers. Does anyone include suicide via asphyxiation in the garage in vehicle accident rates? You want to include suicide, fine, but lets get down to brass tacks and actually explore the subject. For example, in
2009 twice as many people committed suicide via hanging than firearms related homicide and suicide combined. Let that sink in, you are literally going after the least utilized method of suicide, and trying to save lives by banning it. If your actual intent is to save lives, you'd be better off banning rope. Why not ban smoking (what actual purpose does smoking have?), ban alcohol (like handguns, it's real only intended use is recreation), ban pop, McDonalds, etc. Your numbers support your argument even less once gang activity is removed. And, if you think gangs are going to stop killing each other because of a handgun ban, that's a point we'll likely never come to an agreement on.
And finally, if you actually think people aren't going to commit suicide, or whack their neighbor, because they don't have access to a handgun, again, we'll likely never come to an agreement on that point.