Prime Minister Stephen Harper correctly observed last Thursday that it is too soon to start political fights over how shootings by another deranged lunatic at Montreal’s Dawson College might have been prevented.

But that didn’t stop anti-gun advocates, including Quebec Premier Jean Charest, from politicizing the tragedy almost before the sound of ambulance sirens had faded. Some media speculated Kimveer Gill’s murderous rampage will likely “reopen the gun debate,” particularly over the Harper government’s plan to scrap the federal long-gun registry.

That registry was implemented by the Jean Chretien Liberals largely as a reactionary something-must- be-done response to another Montreal school shooting by unhinged madman Marc Lepine at L’Ecole Polytechnique in December 1989, where 14 young women were killed.

However, Gill’s restricted Beretta CX4 Storm semi-automatic carbine, and the other two weapons he carried to Dawson College, were reportedly legally obtained and registered under Canadian firearms law. Lapine’s Ruger Mini-14, now selectively and irrationally banned in Canada, was legal in 1989. Lepine had a Firearms Acquisition Certificate, no criminal record, and would have had no trouble registering his weapon had long-gun registration been in place at the time.

The point being that the problem is not guns per se, but human evil, which will find hideous means of violent expression regardless, if not with guns then with knives or if need be rocks and pointed sticks. Guns do not make people violent. I know literally dozens of gun owners, some with a dozen or more guns. My family doctor collects both long guns and handguns and is a recreational target shooter. No one in my acquaintance has yet harmed another person with a gun (one friend tragically committed suicide).

From 1991 through the gun registry startup in 1998, gun murders had declined 44 percent in Canada to 151 a year from 271. In the first five years after the registry opened, firearms murders increased by 13 percent. Go figure.

Firearms suicides dropped to 802 in 1999 from about 1,100 in 1991, and accidental firearms deaths deaths declined to 37 from 66, virtually all without the registry in operation, evidence that registration is probably virtually irrelevant to the incidence of gun mortality.

Canada is already one of the stiffest gun-control jurisdictions in the world. Handguns have been highly restricted since 1934. Anyone purchasing a long gun or ammunition after 1979 needed a firearms certificate, which required a police background check. However. the Liberals saw an issue that would ingratiate them with urban liberal voters and ran with it, disregarding the facts. Interestingly, 58 per cent of respondents to an unscientific CTV online poll after the Gill shootings said Canadian firearms laws should be “less strict.”

Toward preventing atrocities such as Dawson College and L’Ecole Polytechnique, a more effective avenue of address might be sick and violent video games, like two of Kimveer Gill’s reported faves: Super Columbine Massacre — in which players recreate the killing spree of a couple of alienated nut-jobs at Littleton, Colo., in 1999 that left 13 people dead, and Postal 2: Share the Pain, in which the player goes on a shooting spree. It speaks volumes that one of Gill’s last Weblog entries before setting out for Dawson College was “Going postal …”

Unfortunately, experts, and I unhappily agree, deduce that little if anything effective can be done about video-game depravity at the regulatory level. The Internet is borderless, and to a considerable degree lawless. More assiduous monitoring of blogsites like the one Gill maintained on VampireFreaks.com, which provided plenty of cause for alarm, could have more preemptory effectiveness.

However, ultimately, it’s a problem spawned by an aggressively secular and licentious culture is in willful denial about the innate potential for human evil.

I don’t believe young people today are more intrinsically evil than kids were 50 or 100 or 2,000 years ago. Human tendency toward wrongdoing — defined in Judeo-Christian theology as original sin — is always in tension with our potential for good behaviour. What’s different is that youth in the early 21st century are immersed in one of the most morally bankrupt and depraved popular cultures that has yet blighted the planet.

When a more coherent grasp of reality obtained in our society, human propensity for evil was consensually acknowledged, with pro-active measures in the form of codes of conduct, af?rmed moral standards, etiquette, social taboos, shaming, and when necessary — rigorous penal measures, implemented to keep it in check.

That, not gun registration, is what we need more of.