Just when I was thinking of selling my T-34

[Jester]

So, pick your commodity; alcohol, guns, cigarettes, sex slaves, or radical extremists. Criminals will thwart the law anyway, and prohibitions open black markets.

Some of these things are extremely harmful, and need to be banned. Would you have accepted slaveowners smuggling their slaves into the North, because slaves were just dandy in the South? Some black markets should be legalized, and others need to stay black.

If there is no effective way to enforce your border to prevent the flood of drugs from South America, or 15,000 stolen guns from coming north, what will you do?

We suck it up, if Americans aren't willing to do anything about it. I'm not sure what other choice we have. But I don't understand why we're told we have no right to complain, because apparently Canada is on a different planet from the US, and could not conceivably be affected by these policies.

You prohibit them from your own populations, but you still make them, and we buy them -- some get stolen and now you complain about the dispersions from criminals smuggling?

We do not "prohibit" them from our population. Canadians own guns - lots of them. But we also have rules in place for how you buy them, rules that are flouted every time a gun comes across the border illegally. And, as you have already mentioned, rifles are not a major cause of gun violence. Handguns are.

If Canada sells guns legally to the US, and then the holes in American enforcement means they end up illegally smuggled across the border and back in the hands of Canadian criminals, outside of any established Canadian licensing system, then yes, we have a right to complain about that.

Canada is also a free enterprise country with a free trade agreement with the US - unless you're of the opinion that the government should tell businesses what they can and can't sell to Americans?

And, we think that the prohibition will work this time if we only make it global? Who made all those Glock's and AK47's on US streets?

Who cares? The question is not who manufactures guns. This is irrelevant. The question is, who lets them slip into the hands of criminals, and across borders?

If we legalized marijuana, Canada would have the same problem with weed gushing north too.

And I'd thank the US for it. Not really a user myself, but marijuana is a social good. Unregistered guns aren't.

My point is that in comparison of "we are 1.5 and you are 5.7" are disingenuous since when "all things being equal" the rates are equal. Which means... There is no correlation between violence and the number of guns.

You stand by the claim that, causality aside, there is no correlation between violence and the number of guns? Really? Because some, but not all, US/Canada border states have levels of violent crime about the same as Canada?

The incidence of mental illness influenced violence is a constant across all populations -- so if you have more population you have more murder and suicides by the mentally ill.

Not per capita, you don't.

]Some, yes. About as many as have slipped past our other ports of entry.

Which attacks are we talking about?

I liked that link as it was a Canadian Security Intelligence Services warning us of the risks you pose to the US; "Many Canadians may be surprised to learn that, with the exception of the United States, there are more terrorist groups active in Canada today than in any other country in the world."

CSIS makes its living keeping track of left-wing "subversives." They had files on several of the most harmless people I knew back in 2001, but apparently didn't have the first clue who Osama Bin Laden was. I'm not a big fan. Be that as it may...

"Active" is one of those wonderful vague verbs, where just about anything counts. What did these groups actually do? And what did they do, that they couldn't already do in the US? Fundraise? I'm still missing the part where terrorists "radical extremists" came "flooding" over the border.

-Jester