The 100 m.p.h. pursuit ended in a blaze of gunfire at the Peace Arch, a graceful marble monument that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border near Blaine, proclaiming the nations to be “Children of a Common Mother.”

The murder suspects blew past the U.S. Customs station, and at that point the deputy sheriff took his last chance, managing to ram their vehicle with his squad car, spinning it down an embankment and across a broad lawn that separates the U.S. border checkpoint from its opposite number on the Canadian side.

The suspects fled on foot. In the ensuing gunfight, one was wounded. In the end, both were captured.

The shots that stopped them were fired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspectors, according to Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo.

And how did the Canadian border guards a few yards away prepare themselves, in case the fleeing murder suspects made it across into their jurisdiction? Did they pull vehicles across the crossing point and hunker down with the heaviest weaponry available, prepared to stand their ground?

No. They ran away.

And were the Canadian guards later disciplined or dismissed for this abandonment of their posts?

Just the opposite. Members of his union were responding appropriately to the risk by “walking off” their posts until the danger had passed, explains Ron Moran, president of the Canadian border guards’ union which goes by its bilingual name, the Customs Excise Union Douanes Accise.

Canadian border guards are not armed. Their standard operating procedure if danger looms is to run away -- the Los Angeles Times in a recent article adopted Mr. Moran’s more diplomatic term “walk off” -- and call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to give chase.

“Primarily this has been an image thing,” Mr. Moran explained. “We’re a peaceful nation, with Canadians being proud of the fact that we don’t greet people at the border crossings with someone who’s armed. ... It is strictly a question of these men and women wanting to make sure they get back to their families at the end of the shift.”

Now, before the hooting and hollering at such sissified behavior grows too loud, let’s acknowledge that the macho response is not always the safest or most sensible. Here in the United States, some jurisdictions have begun to seek less lethal means for police to use in apprehending uncooperative suspects, and even to ask whether the risks to public safety may outweigh the hoary rationales for such time-honored traditions as the high-speed pursuit of every fleeing offender.

It is indeed nice to live in a country where -- unlike much of the Third World, and nowadays even Britain and Spain -- police and border guards still look more like civilian helpers and less like shock troops, suited up in combat boots and matching machine carbines.

But in a day and age when those “running the border” almost certainly include would-be terrorists and members of a drug culture for whom (thanks to a brilliant idea called “prohibition”) murder and torture are standard business methods, Canada’s anti-gun fetish may have reached the point of absurdity.

Canada disallows visitors from carrying self-defense arms almost entirely. This is the nation, after all, that demurred a few years ago when the United States military offered some of its most prized decorations to members of the Canadian armed forces who had saved American lives in Afghanistan. In al-Qaida’s eastern mountain redoubt, Canadian snipers using .50-caliber rifles from hard-to-believe ranges took out a machine gun nest that had U.S. forces pinned down in open ground. But the Canadians said no, it was not appropriate to honor members of their military for actually, you know ... shooting enemy soldiers.

Where has this attitude led? Roughly a dozen times in the past four months, Canadian border crossings have been closed for as long as several hours, backing up border traffic for miles, as Canadian guards have “walked away” from their posts in response to reports of dangerous suspects heading north.

The practice became an issue in the recent Canadian national elections, with victorious Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowing during his campaign to “give our customs and border guards the training and equipment they need, including sidearms.”

Mr. Moran of the border guards’ union agrees the time has come. “The reality is that we don’t live in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood anymore,” Mr. Moran told the Times. “The reality is that our officers should be armed.”

Any celebration should be restrained. We can all regret living in a world where this is necessary, and respect those who struggle to cool down any “arms race” before our northern border bristles with tanks and concertina wire.

But our American Constitution protects -- does not create, but only promises to protect -- a general human right to personal arms for a good reason. No less a chronicler of the American Revolution than Thomas Paine noted “Arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside. ... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived the use of them. ... The weak will become a prey to the strong.”

Amen, brother, and pass the .308.