Juno News - June 17, 2019


No gun ban before election, but gun owners aren't in the clear yet

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Bill Blair Evan Solomon
Censored： Official audio record of Conservative MP edited Trudeau's Minister accuses Conservatives of Islamophobia

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

184.9

Word count

800

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bill Blair tells the Globe and Mail that a handgun ban is off the table for now, but a ban on assault weapons is still on the table. Andrew Lutton explains why this is good news for gun owners, but there's still a chance we'll see a gun grab before the election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 For months now, I've been sounding the alarm about what the federal government may do to
00:00:06.360 restrict legal gun owners, law-abiding gun owners like myself in Canada. Today, I bring some good
00:00:13.020 news and some bad news. Now, let's get the good news out of the way first. Bill Blair has said
00:00:18.280 in an interview with the Globe and Mail that the government will not be pursuing a handgun ban
00:00:23.280 that is sweeping in nature. The government will also not be pursuing an order in council prior
00:00:28.660 to the election. This was the concern we had raised a few weeks ago when Bill Blair told
00:00:33.740 Evan Solomon on CTV that he might use a cabinet directive rather than the parliamentary process
00:00:39.660 to implement a gun ban. It appears now that will be off the table at least until the election.
00:00:46.200 Which brings us to the bad news. Just because no action is coming imminently between now and the
00:00:51.220 October election doesn't mean there is not going to be a gun grab from this government. In fact,
00:00:56.340 Bill Blair, for the first time, gave a very in-depth account of what it is that is on the
00:01:01.120 table. Not a handgun ban, but he does want to take aim at what he refers to as assault weapons.
00:01:08.140 There are some weapons that are currently available in our society that represent
00:01:12.040 an unacceptable risk, Blair said. They have been used tragically in a number of incidents in which
00:01:18.320 a large number of people have been killed because these weapons were designed to be efficient
00:01:23.500 in the taking of lives. Blair didn't explain what it is that he was referring to, but anyone
00:01:29.980 knows that he's talking about the AR-15, which as I did a video on a few weeks ago, is not an assault
00:01:35.880 rifle and is not what critics accuse it of being. It's simply a popular semi-automatic rifle used in
00:01:41.680 Canada for target shooting and used without issue by hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even more
00:01:47.040 across North America every single day. But Blair is taking aim at these types of guns. And more
00:01:53.460 importantly, Blair has said in this interview, he does not want to pursue a grandfathering, which was
00:01:58.920 what a lot of gun owners in Canada were hoping for, but rather an outright prohibition, including a
00:02:05.060 buyback. This is what the Globe and Mail article said. Mr. Blair said the government should not simply
00:02:10.040 prohibit new sales of these weapons and allow current owners to keep them under a form of grandfathering.
00:02:15.820 Instead, he said the Liberals will propose to buy them back. In fairness to those individuals, if we
00:02:22.420 were going to prohibit them and remove them from society, we would want to consider the best way to
00:02:28.320 compensate them for the forfeiture of those weapons. He noted that the type of firearms has still not
00:02:34.260 been determined, nor has the buyback scheme that's being proposed. But again, it is still on the table.
00:02:40.260 So as much as gun owners should rejoice that we're not seeing some Orwellian gun grab before the
00:02:45.300 election, the battle is not over. But there's another little bit of good news here. The Liberals
00:02:50.840 are planning to make this an election issue. Now gun owners may be by sheer numbers a minority of
00:02:57.240 Canadians, but they're a very dedicated and motivated group that is not going to take this lying down.
00:03:03.800 There was a Liberal Senator a few weeks back that said the volume of feedback she got from gun owners
00:03:09.100 actually impacted the way she was approaching voting on a bill that was before the Senate at the time.
00:03:14.320 So it's not to say that politicians are always going to listen. In fact, I'd say in most cases,
00:03:19.980 they aren't going to. But there is something to be said when someone who represents gun owners starts 0.81
00:03:25.660 to hear from the millions of licensed gun owners that exist in Canada that, hey, maybe the government's
00:03:32.860 missing the mark here. So while we are in the clear for the next couple of months, gun owners need to
00:03:39.340 stand together and push back against this. One point that Bill Blair makes in this Globe and Mail
00:03:44.240 interview that I want to stress is that he acknowledges banning handguns wouldn't do anything
00:03:49.300 to stop the flow of guns across the border. Bill Blair is recognizing that the problems with gun crime
00:03:56.000 exist in border smuggling. Yet even so, he thinks that a prohibition on AR-15s, for example,
00:04:03.780 would somehow mitigate gun crime in Canada. He's acknowledging in this very interview that the
00:04:09.680 border is where the problem is. So my recommendation to Minister Blair would be to focus more on border
00:04:14.740 security than on hobby gun shooters. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.