Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal cabinet outlawed “assault-style” weapons with the wave of a pen on May 1, 2020 – no House of Commons debate, no Parliamentary committee review – the RCMP estimated there were between 90,000 and 105,000 such firearms in the country.
This is a ridiculously low estimate. In just the last 12 months before Trudeau’s infamous order-in-council, legitimate Canadian gun owners legally purchased nearly 30,000 AR-15s – the most popular of the guns the Liberals would ban.
That’s 30,000 units of just one of the more than 1,500 models of guns the Trudeau cabinet outlawed.
It has been legal to own such “restricted” firearms for decades. And guns don’t decompose.
So given that 30,000 more were added to the national arsenal in 2019 alone, how likely is it that the total inventory was just 100,000 on the day such guns were banned?
But let’s play the government’s numbers game for a while. Let’s accept their fanciful claim of 100,000.
As of mid-December, just 160 of the banned guns had been turned in for destruction.
That’s fewer than two-tenths of 1%.
Under the May 1, 2020 cabinet dictate banning scary-looking guns (which nonetheless on the inside are exactly the same as many legal hunting rifles), the firearms became instantly illegal.
Despite the fact that it is exceeding rare in Canada for a legally acquired, assault-style weapon to be used in a crime, Trudeau immediately made it against the law to buy or sell one of these guns, even privately to a friend or family member.
The day the order was released, it became illegal to fire one, even at a firing range or on your remote ranch. Owners couldn’t take them out of their gun safes or transport them legally in their vehicles, except mostly to turn them in at a police station.
It was a completely Draconian order made without any democratic process. And it was destined from the start to be useless.
The ban followed the Nova Scotia mass killing of 22 people by Gabriel Wortman masquerading as a Mountie. But none of Wortman’s guns had been legally acquired.
Smuggling high-power rifles and, especially, handguns from the States is the biggest source of crime guns in Canada, not the gun racks of hunters, collectors and farmers.
But Trudeau is interested purely in virtue signalling. He doesn’t really care whether his ban makes sense, only that it sends the right signal to his supporters, who are equally ignorant of the true causes of gun crime.
The assault weapon ban looks and sounds as clever to Liberal voters as it does to Trudeau, so of course they’re sure it’s the right thing to do.
But gun owners aren’t so easily duped.
The 2020 order compelled them to turn in their banned guns for destruction by April 30, 2022. Yet 99.9 % of them have yet to do so.
No doubt this is largely because the buyback program is not yet in place. Anyone who turns in his or her guns now risks not receiving any cash from Ottawa when the buyback begins.
But the fact the buyback hasn’t even been set up 20 months after the ban was proclaimed and just four months before the deadline for surrendering guns shows just how unprepared and incompetent the Liberals are at putting their virtue signals into action.
I hope the Trudeau government never gets around to confiscating the guns of legal firearms owners. I am cheering for the buyback’s failure.
It is unrealistic, to the point of asininity, to imagine that with 120 days to go until 100,000 (or more) guns have to be turned in that the Trudeau Libs can create a buyback that will work.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-why-im-cheering-for-trudeaus-gun-buy-back-to-fail