"It is not quite accurate to say that everything I know about the differences between Americans and Canadians I learned while babysitting. But I did pick up some crucial information that, decades after my babysitting years in suburban Chicago, still offers perspective. One experience has never left me. I thought about it earlier this month after a man opened fire on a political meeting at a Tucson supermarket.
I was looking after a young boy, the son of a family I had never babysat for before. At one point, he ran upstairs and returned with something to show me: a handgun.
Not only did having an easily accessible handgun in the house terrify me, but looking after a boy who was curious enough to drag it out to impress the new babysitter made me wonder how long it would be before he took a closer look, and whether he would survive his curiosity.
Having the gun in the house, no doubt, made his family feel safe. Why else would they have it by their bed? It made me feel the opposite. And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between the prevalent views toward handguns in Canada versus the United States. It also explains why no amount of statistics will change minds that are set in their views.
There has been plenty of talk about the gun culture in the U.S. since the Tucson shootings (in which six people, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed and 13 others, including congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords were injured.).
We now know that Arizona is ground-zero for gun culture in the U.S., that it has some of the most lax gun regulations in the country, and that almost anyone can get a gun and can then carry it, concealed, almost anywhere.
Alan Korwin, author of The Arizona Gun Owner's Guide, expressed the thinking behind that culture during an interview on CBC Radio. When his theory that the shooting would have turned out differently if someone else in the crowd had a Glock and could have stopped Loughner was questioned, he responded this way:
"We know that criminals go crazy, you send in people with guns to stop them. More guns, less crime. When the citizens are armed they are a deterrent to crime. When the citizens are disarmed, the criminals have no controls of any practical nature. And that's what we saw in that great tragedy."
But people in the crowd were, in fact, carrying guns that day. One man came around a corner, pointed his firearm at a man with a gun and told him to drop it. But that man was yet another bystander trying to take control of the situation with his own gun. Neither fired, but the two of them very nearly contributed to the carnage, rather than stopping it.
But this view that guns in the right hands make life safer and that gun ownership is such a fundamental right that it should only be denied in the most extreme of circumstance, finds support in tragedies such as the Tucson shooting. The more shootings there are, the more people like Korwin are convinced that more guns are needed.
The fact that statistics, studies and common sense say something else makes little difference to vocal anti-regulation gun advocates.
So it was with a sense of futility that, in the days after the shooting, I looked up a study written by three associate professors from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health comparing the U.S. and Canadian approaches to handgun regulation.
They noted that, at the time (2007) there were 200 million firearms in civilian hands in the U.S., and that 16 per cent of U.S. adults owned a handgun. In Canada, by contrast, there were about seven million firearms, about one million of them handguns. In 2004, nearly 30,000 people were killed by firearms in the U.S., while there are about 850 firearm deaths in Canada a year, most of them suicides.
The study found that more guns means more homicide, suicide and accidental firearms-related deaths, and that there are fewer guns in places with tougher gun laws. It seems so obvious that it hardly needs stating but it is not.
"Governments that implement restrictive gun laws may be viewed as paternalistic and lacking in deference to the wishes of law-abiding adults who perceive a need to own firearms for self-protection, or simply enjoy firearms," the report's authors write. So what is the ethical thing for governments to do? Restrict firearms, they conclude, for the same reason mandatory vaccine laws exist -- they make the community safer.
"Our analysis demonstrates that the Canadian approach to handgun regulation is an ethical one."
Most of us already knew that, but it is good to remember why.
Elizabeth Payne is a member of the Citizen's editorial board.
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