Watching that one-time cop, now Canada’s public safety minister, Bill Blair, blather on about guns is annoying. The liberal plan to do something about the proliferation of guns in our society is nothing more than a con job. When you are grandfathering the guns that are already out there, you are hardly banning them.
Canadians have been asking for a total ban on weapons other than those designed and registered for law enforcement, skeet and target shooting or licensed hunting. There is absolutely no need for collectors to have operable weapons. And collections need to be certified as inoperable by qualified arms experts.
What also worries me is the suggestion that Canada’s aboriginals should be collectively exempt from the ban. That would be a license to stock guns of all types along with the cigarettes so freely sold to anybody on first nation’s properties. I live 30-minutes down the highway from the Mnjikaning First Nation Indian Reserve No. 32 on Lake Couchiching, whose property includes Rama Casino.
At a rough guess, if the cigarette sellers on that reserve were selling only to residents of the reserve, every man, woman and child on that reserve must be smoking about 12 packages of cigarettes every day. Canada has more than a few unprotected borders.
What does not seem to be widely understood about firearms in Canada is that modern assault weapons, capable of continuous fire, are already banned. These are the weapons that can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. Those weapons have never been approved for sale or possession in Canada.
But what city police really want to be rid of are hand guns. Nobody hunts game with a Glock. These sneak over the border from the U.S. and also go astray from legal (and illegal) collections. They are then passed around by kid gangs for serious mayhem. These untrained shooters are such bad shots that they often kill the wrong person—according to some victims’ families.
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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry
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