GUNTER: No public safety benefit from Liberals' plan to confiscate 'assault-style' firearms
They could just let the whole scheme expire and save themselves and law-abiding gun owners a lot of time and expense.
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During his campaign to become Liberal leader and again during the federal election, Mark Carney promised to follow through with his party’s five-year-old plan to confiscate “assault-style” firearms from law-abiding Canadians.
This is yet another way the Carney government is very much like the Trudeau government.
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Below I’ll get into the insanity of a government thinking it can stop criminals from using firearms illegally by forcing non-criminals to give up their legal property. This is the logical equivalent of forcing all non-drinking Canadians to surrender their cars to the government because drunk drivers are causing death and mayhem on our roads.
But apart from the intellectual fallacies of confiscation, there is a practical problem looming for the gun-loathing Liberals. Their confiscation program is set to end on Oct. 31 and they haven’t collected a single firearm from a private citizen. They claim to have taken 12,000 from the inventories of gun shops at a cost of about $70 million, but not one from an individual.
More importantly, they have no idea of how they will collect 200,000 or more guns in the time remaining.
They could just let the whole scheme expire and save themselves and law-abiding gun owners a lot of time and expense that isn’t going to make Canada one whit safer. But they’re Liberals. So of course they’re going to extend their confiscation deadline.
Whatever new deadline they choose will be their fourth (April 2022, October 2023, October 2025 and whenever).
The fact they have had more than five years since they announced this “assault weapons” ban and they still have been unable to come up with a method for seizing Canadians’ property and compensating those who will lose their guns, is probably a sign of just how futile this whole exercise is.
The parliamentary budget officer estimates completing the confiscation will cost more than $700 million more. And the truth of the matter is all that money and all that anguish on the part of hunters, sport shooters and farmers will lead to no safer streets.
Think of it this way: Police estimate that upwards of 90 per cent of guns used in crimes in Canada are brought in illegally from the U.S. That means even if the 200,000 scary-looking guns are grabbed by the Liberals, the guns used most often to commit violent crimes will still be on our streets.
Scads of taxpayer money will be spent and no public good will be achieved.
Also consider the illogic of it.
Criminals with guns are the problem – people who are prepared to break laws against murdering, robbing, assaulting and so on. Yet somehow, Liberal politicians and bureaucrats have convinced themselves that when the government makes it illegal to own “assault-style weapons,” dangerous criminals will suddenly turn into law-abiding rule followers. It’s ridiculous.
I expect the Liberals will extend their current deadline by cabinet decree over the summer while Parliament isn’t sitting. When they do, keep three things in mind.
First, the Nova Scotia shooter, Gabriel Wortman, did not acquire his weapons legally. Even if the Liberals’ ban had been in place before he killed 22 people, he still would have had his guns. No one would have been saved.
Second, despite calling them “assault-style,” none of the banned guns are machineguns. Those have been illegal in Canada for decades.
And third, there are lots of rifles and shotguns that have exactly the same firepower are the banned models. In many cases, they are the same gun with different appearances. The banned ones are no more deadly, they just have cladding, paint jobs or metal finishes that make them look more militaristic.
In short, the Liberals are judging guns by their superficial appearances, not their lethality. Talk about books and their covers.
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