National Post Editorial Board on The Hobbema Gun Amnesty: It'll take more than ribbons of hope

Posted: August 20, 2008, 11:00 AM by Dan Goldbloom

National Post

It looks like the gun amnesty on the Hobbema reserve southeast of Edmonton has turned into yet another disaster for the RCMP — not that the blame rests solely, or even primarily, with it. But it seems these days that Canadians never have to wait very long for the force to stumble into yet another credibility-destroying incident. The amnesty was announced on July 23: Spokesmen for the RCMP boasted about how the move was decided upon after extensive “community consultations,” and Alberta Justice Minister Alison Redford was right there to back it up. “Just think about it: Guns off the street will mean less crime,” said the Minister. “That’s pretty simple.”

She should have said “simpleminded.” The “amnesty,” like any other program that demonizes inanimate objects as a source of social ills, was half-baked to begin with. Participants were promised only that they would not be charged with illegally possessing the guns they were choosing to reveal and surrender: If the weapons were found to have been stolen or used in a crime, charges could still result.

In other words, all the police and the government were doing was giving Hobbema’s residents a chance to disarm themselves in the midst of a permanent gang war. They might just as well have been helpfully pointing out some convenient river in which people could go dump their guns.
In the early morning of July 28, practically on the eve of the “amnesty,” the bullet-riddled body of 16-year-old Billy Buffalo was found behind a house on the Samson band’s section of the reserve, and a few hours later another man was wounded in a shootout between two neighbouring houses. A councillor for the neighbouring Montana band declared, “It just goes to show that more than ever we need the gun amnesty, that we need to implement it.” But Hobbema’s First Nations were apparently unconvinced: At the end of the first day of the “amnesty,” Aug. 1, Hobbema RCMP had to announce that a grand total of one weapon, a “long-barrelled firearm,” had been turned in. Only a handful more have been received since.

Meanwhile, the sound of gunfire has continued without surcease. Another body, that of 21-year-old Dale Dechamps, was found in a Samson alleyway on Aug. 2. And on Monday, 20-year-old Delena Dixon was shot in the head and killed in the home she shared with her mother and her baby daughter. The house had already been scored with gunfire, and a male occupant wounded the night before — but apparently the RCMP either didn’t have the manpower to protect the family inside or simply didn’t think it was necessary. Ms. Dixon’s stepfather says he is a former gang member, but that no one living in the house has current gang connections.

Perhaps he is not the most credible witness, but he says that the gun amnesty hasn’t done anything to minimize the violence in Hobbema, and an aboriginal RCMP officer with the Hobbema detachment agrees. In fact, Constable Perry Cardinal told The Edmonton Journal’s Paula Simons on Monday that gun complaints have “spiked” since Aug. 1, and that more semi-automatic and automatic weapons are coming into play. “It’s almost like we’re spinning our wheels,” he says ruefully.

We don’t have magic answers for the violence that the four Cree nations of Hobbema are suffering. That, indeed, is the point: It’s time to give up on packages of good intentions held together with ribbons of hope. Most of the 12,000 residents of the community want the gang violence to end, but apparently they are not fed up enough to provide eyewitness evidence to the police when someone gets murdered, to stop welcoming gang-connected family members into their own homes or to kick the drugs that fund the gangs.

Not everybody even agrees there is a particular problem. Hobbema teenagers interviewed for Tuesday’s Journal complained that the place was getting a bad rap from the media. One argued, “There’s nothing different about here; the city has drugs and death.” Too true, but perhaps there’s a math education problem here: If metro Edmonton had Hobbema’s 2008 homicide statistics, the city would be up to 450 murders by now, all of them unsolved.