Oh … Canada.
In a move that is somehow both stunning and not surprising at all, Canada officially banned the buying, selling and transferring of handguns on Friday. People will also not be able to bring newly acquired handguns into the country.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the widespread ban at a news conference in Surrey, British Columbia.
The announcement was made on the prime minister’s web site and Twitter as well.
We’ve already banned more than 1,500 types of assault-style firearms. And we’ll continue to do whatever it takes to keep guns out of our communities. More details here: https://t.co/bgdU9aoGt4
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) October 21, 2022
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Of note, handgun ownership registration processes that began before Friday will be honored, and all current handgun owners will be able to keep their current weapons.
This sweeping handgun ban follows just a few scant years after a similar May 2020 ban on “military-grade assault weapons.” Those weapons included 1,500 different models and variants.
To put that in perspective, within a span of 30 months, Canada has completely frozen the sale and movement of most guns in the country. Thirty months is a shockingly small time frame to pull that off.
Will similar legislation ever happen in America?
You could give America 30 years, and they probably couldn’t ban 15 models and variants of weapons, let alone over 1,500 guns.
That naturally begs the scary question: What’s next for Canada?
Based on what has been banned, it appears most shotguns and hunting rifles are still par for the course. But how quickly could that change given what everyone has seen lately from Canada?
If a bad person legally acquired a shotgun and goes on a murdering spree with it, surely shotguns will be next to be fully banned in Canada. Although, it is worth noting that Canada has yet to ban knives given some of the murderous rampages the country has been subjected to. And that last comment was only half-sarcastic.
Fortunately, there does appear to be some semblance of reason up North.
A quartet of provinces have refused to cooperate with Trudeau’s gun-targeting C-21 Bill.
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba all voiced their opposition to C-21 in early October and made it clear that they do not plan to reallocate any police resources to enforce any mandatory gun buybacks. More recently, New Brunswick also appeared to have joined this opposition coalition.
Thank you New Brunswick (@Gouv_NB) for joining Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba in opposing the use of police resources for the federal firearms confiscation program.
More details here:https://t.co/CiRmOrreJe
— Tyler Shandro ?? (@shandro) October 14, 2022
Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s Minister of Justice, made it clear that these restrictive laws are only truly targeting law-abiding citizens.
“The federal government’s national handgun freeze is now in effect. The ban means that Canadians interested in becoming new handgun owners are unable to do so. Sadly, with no new purchases being made, ranges, sport shooting clubs and firearms-related businesses will slowly be forced to shut down, compromising livelihoods and recreational opportunities for tens of thousands of Canadians,” Shandro began in a statement.
“The federal government will pretend that this is about public safety, deliberately conflating legal handgun ownership with the violence that we see in many urban centres across Canada. In reality, the handguns used to perpetrate criminal acts in our urban centres are typically illegally obtained and are smuggled across the U.S. border by weapons traffickers,” he continued.
In his most scathing comment, he accused Trudeau’s administration of trying to scapegoat handgun owners.
“The federal government’s real goal is to scapegoat handgun owners and use wedge politics to appeal to a narrow base of voters who wish to see legal firearm ownership in this country eliminated entirely.”
Again, all handguns and a large number of “assault” weapons have effectively been banned in Canada in a span of 30 months.
Thirty. Measly. Months. And they’re still moving forward with this.
If you’ve ever wondered why America’s Second Amendment is so very important, just look up North.
