By Jim Hagarty
2016
I am going to try to write this as delicately as I can. There is nothing funny about the following story, just a bit of irony perhaps.
I have made clear my views about the gun culture in the United States. To be blunt, I find it crazy and terrifying.
We don’t have the same culture in Canada. We do have guns and in some of our bigger cities, young people especially in the past few years have been raining hell down on their communities with their weapons.
But the average Canadian doesn’t believe in guns. Guns are for farmers and hunters and, of course, police. It is still an object of curiosity for a lot of us to be standing behind a cop in line at a coffee shop and to see a gun (loaded, I assume) holstered to his or her waist. However, we simply don’t fear that our fellow citizens are “carrying”, whether “open” or not. We are not filled with paranoia about roving gangs and home invasions to the point where we think we need to accumulate our own arsenals. We have gangs and we have home invasions but a lot of times, violence is not even involved in the activities of gangs or home invaders.
And we don’t have the will to shoot and ask questions later. For example, a few years ago, in the middle of the night while we were sleeping, someone stole our car, drove it 50 miles from here into a farmer’s field, then got out and destroyed the vehicle, smashing every piece of glass out of it, jumping on the hood, trunk and roof and stealing the wheels.
We were shocked and dismayed the next morning when police called us, obviously. We were told the theft was probably done by some young guys who had come to our town from a city down the road, partied at the bars and then had no way home. So they stole our car.
Here is my point of all that. If I had been awake at that hour and peeked out my window to see our car being stolen by three or four young men, it would not have occurred to me to intervene. I would have called the police and let them deal with it. Assuming I had one, I certainly wouldn’t have gone rushing out to the driveway with my gun, blasting in all directions, intent on trading human lives for a hunk of metal, plastic and rubber. I didn’t like those guys, whoever they were, but I would not wish death on them.
Home invaders? Maybe another story, but police here tell us the only time invaders are dangerous is if there are caught by surprise, are challenged, and see no way out but violence. Never corner a rat, in other words. If I come home and realize strangers are in my house, I don’t go in and start yelling. I call the police. That’s what I pay my damn taxes for.
If my kids are in the house alone, maybe we are looking at a different story.
So all that for this. And hopefully the irony I mentioned.
We may not have a gun culture in Canada, but we do have a hockey culture. And if there are more than 300 million guns in the U.S., we have at least that many hockey sticks for a population one tenth the size. I don’t know if there is a house in our country which doesn’t have at least one stick in the garage. In our shed, for example, there are at least 15 sticks tucked away in the rafters.
And apparently, some of us are not afraid to use our sticks for non-hockey situations.
During a road rage incident in Calgary this week, two men attacked the driver of a van, using a hockey stick to smash out the windows of the vehicle and hitting the driver with the stick. The driver was taken to hospital with lots of injuries to the face.
The two men, pleased with their work, jumped into their BMW and drove off.
So, terrible, for sure, but at least the driver is still alive, unlike the road rage incident in the U.S. last year where two male drivers jumped out of their cars, pulled out their guns and shot each other to death.
You see, Canadians are not better people than Americans. It’s just that hockey sticks, even the $500 ones that some players use, do not seem to have the same firepower as machine guns, for some reason.
And to show you how much “not better” some of us are, the driver these two cowardly assholes attacked was a woman and she had a baby in a car seat in the back of her van.
But on a brighter note, everybody’s alive and mostly well today. And while I could never condone the terrible actions of these two privileged idiots (BMW?), call me a snowflake, but I don’t want them dead. In jail would be nice, but not dead.
Maybe, in that, there is a bit of cultural difference between some people in our two countries after all. I can’t speak for other Canadians, but I am guessing that the majority of us feel this way.
It is why we did away with the death penalty more than 50 years ago. The last executions in Canada took place in Toronto in 1962 when two men were put to death for murder. The last woman executed was hanged in 1953.
