Soon after becoming prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau and his surrogates began floating the idea of a major new gun confiscation program. With that threat looming over them, Canadians have been buying up restricted firearms in record numbers..In a report tabled in Parliament, we learn that the number of restricted firearms has exploded by 24 per cent in the first three years of Trudeau’s first mandate, bringing the total to 1.16 million. Restricted firearms cover all handguns and some long guns, and come with very strict conditions around purchase, storage and usage..According to the Department of Justice, Canada has one of the most heavily armed civilian populations in the world, ranking 7th globally. There are an estimated three million (legal) civilian gun owners in Canada owning about seven million firearms, of which a majority are non-restricted (mostly hunting and sport shooting long guns)..Trudeau’s talk about banning and confiscating more guns turned from musing to promise in the October 2019 election. In his platform, he promised to ban “military-style assault rifles,” and ordered his Public Safety Minister, Bill Blair to make them illegal with a “buyback program.”.This is problematic for several reasons..“Assault rifles” have been illegal for civilian ownership since the early 1970s. Full stop. Anyone outside of the military or police caught in possession of an assault rifle would have their firearms licence revoked, and face significant jail time. This makes gun owners nervous about what exactly Trudeau means when he says that he will ban something that has been banned for several generations..Further compounding worry of arbitrary gun seizures is the promise to ban “military-style” guns. While “assault rifles” have a definition, there is no definition of “military-style.” Anti-gun activists in Canada and the U.S. generally mean ‘guns that look aesthetically like something used in the military.” Most of these activists lack any practical firearms experience, and are unaware that replacing a wooden stock with a composite stock doesn’t make the gun any more dangerous. It’s akin to putting a Ford Fiesta engine in a Ferrari’s body, and calling it “race-car style.”.This all leads to legitimate fears that the Trudeau government will come to confiscate their otherwise lawful property without having any idea what they are doing. As a result, sales in restricted firearms have skyrocketed..It’s not unimaginable that Canadian gun owners will stockpile these guns expecting them to be banned, and simply refuse to hand them over when the government sends police squads to their doors. Police expecting to seize the newly-illegal guns may search houses, only to find they can’t find the cache buried in the backyard or at the cabin..While the police are ordered to raid peaceful homes, the real source of gun violence will likely go unchecked. While the federal government does not release data on the number of illegal or smuggled guns used in the commission of crime, Toronto’s police chief did. In his city, 82 per cent of “crime guns” are illegally smuggled from the U.S., and not purchased lawfully in Canada. If Ottawa, would deign to release these statistics nationally, there’s a pretty good bet that it would undercut their scapegoating of law-abiding gun owners..Naturally, anti-gun activists like Neidi Rathjen of PolySeSouvient blame the spike in legal restricted firearms sales on shadowy gun lobbyists with the power to compel people to buy things.. Trudeau on WE scandal: Case closed .“We have a gun lobby that is growing in size, growing in numbers. We have a record number of gun owners and there’s heavy promotion going on with respect to the ownership of restricted weapons.”.While Canada may have one of the largest civilian gun owning populations in the world, it is still a minority of the population. The Liberals also have little to fear of political fallout because this minority is disproportionately in rural and Western Canada, and voted overwhelmingly Conservative or PPC in the last election..Doubtless, gun owner groups have been sounding the alarm about a looming Liberal plan to seize their property, but real credit for Canada’s gun-boom goes to Justin Trudeau..Derek Fildebrandt is Publisher of the Western Standard and the President of Wildrose Media Corp.
