BlakeBrown

Articles by: Blake Brown

Nova Scotia’s Mass Casualty Commission calls for stricter gun control laws

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4th April 2023

Professor Blake Brown, Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia

ANALYSIS: The Mass Casualty Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia shootings that left 22 people dead has made a range of recommendations around tighter gun control, particularly of the most powerful and potentially destructive weapons; Professor Blake Brown of St Mary’s University believes the non-partisan nature of the Commission will give its findings added weight – but if and how quickly they are implemented by the federal government remains to be seen.

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Blake Brown
Professor, History, Saint Mary’s University

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Blake Brown is a Professor in the Department of History at Saint Mary’s University, and is cross-appointed to the Atlantic Canada Studies program. He holds a PhD in history from Dalhousie University, a MA in history from York University, and a BA in history from Acadia University. In addition, he completed a law degree and a MA in criminology at the University of Toronto prior to undertaking his PhD. Professor Brown has been the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair and Visiting Scholar in History at Vanderbilt University, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Victoria in Wellington, a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Post-Doctoral Fellow at Saint Mary’s University, a Fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin, and a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School. Professor Brown’s principal research and teaching interests are modern Canadian history, legal history, and the history of Atlantic Canada. His articles have appeared in various journals, including the Canadian Historical Review, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Journal of History, Acadiensis, the McGill Law Journal, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of Law & Social Inquiry. He is the author of A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2009), Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2012)“ and (with Philip Girard and Jim Phillips) A History of Law in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to 1866 (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2018).