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