As Matt Gurney of the National Post  said, it was a rare outbreak of sanity in Toronto as the Toronto City Council voted against banning bullets inside the city limits.  The city that voted so stupidly to ban plastic bags managed to find an ounce or two of common sense this past Thursday as they voted down moronic city councilor Adam Vaughan’s motion to ban bullets.  At 28-13 against, the vote wasn’t even close.

As bizarre as it sounds, even Adam Vaughan voted against his own motion.  Was this Vaughan coming to his senses?  I highly doubt that.  I’m sure he had some other motive in mind now that the national press spotlight had pretty much fizzled out on him and his latest harebrained publicity scheme.

To quote Matt Gurney’s National Post column:

Vaughan insists that if it was properly reviewed, people would be swayed by the evidence and logic of his bullet ban. But there’s no evidence or logic behind it at all. Set aside the fact that ammunition and firearms are already both heavily regulated in Canada. Set aside the fact that Toronto is, by any big-city standard, tremendously safe. The fact remains, as the evidence shows, that the city of Toronto is not an island. Cutting off legal access to bullets within the 416 area code would do absolutely nothing to stop bullets from being sold and stored in the 905 region that surrounds Toronto. Unless Vaughan intended to recreate the Berlin Wall along Steeles Avenue, his plan was going nowhere.

In a word… Duh!

Law-abiding firearm owners, whether inside the Toronto bubble or outside of it, are not the source of the “gun problem”.  They do, however, make great political scapegoats, a fact Adam Vaughan knows very well.

If simply banning something would cause it to cease to exist, then all of humanity’s ailments would be very easily solved.

Don’t like drinking?  Ban alcohol.

Don’t like drugs?  Ban them!

Want to rid the world of rapists?  That’s easy, just ban rape.

Murder?  Ban it.

Problem solved, right?

America tried banning alcohol, remember?  It was called Prohibition and failed so spectacularly that it spawned organized crime as we know it today.  America and Canada alike have banned drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin only to see their use skyrocket since the so-called “War on Drugs” was declared.

Actual crimes against people like rape and murder have been banned for thousands of years.  Hasn’t stopped many murders or rapes, has it?

No, of course not, and for the same reason that drug and alcohol prohibitions fail spectacularly every single day of the year: only law-abiding citizens obey these bans.

Imagine that.

If solving the problem of rape was as simple as banning it, then women would have magically been transformed from potential victims into 100% safe citizens overnight, immediately after the first law against rape was instituted.  Didn’t happen, did it?  Of course not.

If simply banning murder would stop murderers from committing their heinous acts, then banning murder would really show serial killer Robert Pickton a thing or two, wouldn’t it?  Sure, but it didn’t and never will.

If banning marijuana, cocaine and heroin would stop drug abuse, then Vancouver’s Downtown East Side would be the best and safest place on earth to live wouldn’t it?  Sure, but it’s not and no amount of money dumped into that failed pit of drug addiction will ever solve that problem either.

Murder has been with us since the time of Cain and Abel.  Rape, alcohol and drug addiction followed not far behind.

Banning something does not and never has worked.  When we can’t even enforce a ban on drugs or weapons inside federal prisons, the most highly controlled environment we have, then what on earth makes us believe that a ban can work anywhere else?

I’ve never been able to comprehend why such a simple fact is continually and constantly overlooked by idiots like Adam Vaughan, who think that simply declaring something illegal will remove it from existence.

The answer is quite simple, even though politicians don’t like to hear it.

There is evil in the heart of Mankind and it’s not going away any time soon.  Mankind is only as good as he or she wants to be in a given moment, and when Mankind wants to be evil, we are very, very good at it.

Politicians like Nanny State Ninny Adam Vaughan are not stupid, they’re much, much worse.  They are disingenuous, deceitful and motivated by the worst of all human ambitions: their own insatiable lust for power.

Hey, here’s an idea… how about we just ban that too?