What happens when you follow every rule, design a Canadian-made sporting rifle, and then you build a business around it? Well, you get banned anyway, and the government destroys your business. No warning, no consultation, just a bureaucratic stroke of the pen that labels your compliant firearm prohibited and then results in you closing your business and laying off your staff? That s what happened to J.R. Cox and the team at Sterling Arms in Calgary.
00:00:00.000They followed the rules, they built the gun, and then the government banned it anyway.
00:00:18.700I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
00:00:30.000What happens when you follow every rule, design a Canadian-made sporting rifle to comply with the law, and then you build a business around it?
00:00:46.580If you're J.R. Cox and the team at Sterling Arms in Calgary, well, you get banned anyway, and the government destroys your business.
00:00:53.720No warning, no consultation, just a bureaucratic stroke of the pen that labels your compliant firearm prohibited, and then results in you closing your business and laying off your staff.
00:01:05.600That's the story of the R9MK1, a non-restricted, non-military-style rifle that the Liberals suddenly decided looked too scary.
00:01:15.460And just like that, workers are laid off, shelves are empty, and another Canadian firearms business is crushed under the weight of arbitrary regulation.
00:01:25.800Joining me tonight is Tracy Wilson from the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights to break down this targeted attack on legal gun owners and manufacturers,
00:01:34.880and to ask the question we're all thinking.
00:01:37.120If obeying the law isn't enough to stay in business, what hope does anyone in the firearms community have left?
00:06:25.660There are, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of other models of firearms that you can buy.
00:06:30.480So, as time has progressed since May of 2020, they've routinely banned all those guns that we've been buying to replace the ones we can't use.
00:06:39.400And yet, there's still somewhere between 500,000 and a million rifles that are now banned sitting safely in the safes of gun owners who've owned them safely for decades, if not generations, without issue.
00:06:51.820And not a single crime is being committed.
00:06:54.300So, yeah, I don't know where they're going with this, but it's got to stop.
00:07:00.300Well, and there's zero accountability.
00:07:03.520Like, you don't know even who's making these decisions.
00:07:06.180I guess, ultimately, it's the Liberals who are accountable.
00:07:08.620But these bans are happening outside of Parliament as just sort of a bureaucratic checkbox.
00:07:15.940You never even really know who's doing this to you outside of the Liberals making sure that the RCMP Firearms Office still has this power.
00:07:25.360But from my lips to God's ears, if the Conservatives ever get back into power, these sort of bans must go before Parliament because you are criminalizing people with no proof, no data, no anything, and no way for us to even know who's doing it to us.
00:07:43.280Well, and they're not notifying anyone.
00:07:46.120So I've got all kinds of friends who own one of those rifles, and they don't even know it's been banned.
00:07:51.440People are showing up at their local rod and gun clubs to shoot on a Sunday afternoon, not knowing that their gun is prohibited.
00:07:59.620And that's the problem when you've got bureaucrats in the RCMP Firearms Lab who are making these decisions arbitrarily, telling nobody, notifying no gun owners.
00:08:10.840You know, there's not even an email that goes out.
00:08:19.000They don't notify a single person, so people don't even know it's been banned.
00:08:23.320The guy who designed the rifle didn't even know it was banned when I sent it to him.
00:08:28.820So, you know, this isn't the way that it should work in a society where we respect our citizens.
00:08:35.840Gun owners are Canada's most vetted, trusted people, and yet we're treated like simple criminals, while actual violent criminals are being let out of jail the same day they're committing their crimes.
00:08:47.660Yeah, I was looking at the crime stats the other day because my mother-in-law was fighting with somebody on the internet, and violent crime has gone up 40% since 2014, and yet instead of actually directly addressing that, dealing with bail, by the way, instead we continue to target Canadian gun owners, and low estimates put the cost of the gun grab at $343 million, like a third of a billion dollars.
00:09:17.260I think it is closer to Gary Mauser over at the Fraser Institute, his estimate.
00:09:26.300I think that's probably more reasonable when you factor in the cost of policing, when you factor in the cost of identifying firearms, and you don't have a clue where they are because you've decided to move them from non-restricted to prohibited.
00:09:42.520Think of how much could be fixed with $6 billion.
00:09:45.580Yeah, well, and there's a couple of factors there that nobody's talking about.
00:09:50.120When the government came out with their, you know, $343 million or whatever, that didn't include the cost of administrating the program, which will far outweigh the cost of any kind of compensation, which they're also low-balling.
00:10:06.240I think Bill Blair said there's 178,000 rifles out there that have been banned.
00:10:25.180We are talking anywhere, like I said, between half a million to a million guns.
00:10:29.780And the cost of administrating this, like, right from the very beginning, I've said it's virtually impossible because Canada is such a wide and vast and massive country.
00:10:40.120They're in every nook and cranny of the nation, and they have no idea who's got them or where they are.
00:11:37.560We're just not reflected in the crime stats at all.
00:11:40.040Well, I wanted to talk to you about this recent LaPresse article.
00:11:46.260And it's pretty clear that LaPresse is catching up to the gun blog's previous reporting on ECOS polling data that was, I think it was done out of the Privy Council.
00:11:58.360They conducted a 148-question deep dive into the minds of lawful gun owners because I guess they're trying to pull a sigh up on us.
00:12:09.060They want to know why we won't comply or what our problem is.
00:12:30.500Yeah, I could have saved them some money there.
00:12:32.100One of the things that I found a great source of pride for me was more than two-thirds of the respondents said they don't trust the feds to make good decisions about firearms in the public interest.
00:12:44.280But in Alberta, that distrust jumps to 81%.
00:12:50.940Yeah, and then over, they could only find nine people out of the 1,700-plus people that they polled who actually thought that firearms owners would 100% comply with the gun bans.
00:13:09.200I'm surprised there's nine people out there.
00:13:19.800I mean, gun owners have good reason not to trust the government, right?
00:13:22.880I mean, I always talk about the social contract, so to speak, between gun owners and the government and gun owners and law enforcement.
00:13:30.440And the deal was, you go and take the courses and you submit yourself to all those background checks and the application process, and you include your spouse in that information, and they contact them to make sure that it's okay you have guns.
00:13:48.260It's really invasive, and then you're subjected to a 24-hour background check through CPIC.
00:13:54.700And the idea was, if you go through all this, and you go through the vetting, and you're trusted, you're trained, then they would leave you alone.
00:14:03.560So some of these guns we've owned for, you know, for decades, if not generations.
00:14:08.580And all of a sudden, now, the government's moving the goalposts.
00:14:12.340So if the idea here is we're going to have strict gun control regime, which Canada has, one of the strictest in the world, but you're going to have buy-in from gun owners,
00:14:22.040after everything they've subjected themselves to just for the simple fact of wanting to own a firearm and be a hunter or sports shooter, and then you come back and say it's still not enough, we're still going to take your stuff, I'm surprised there are nine people out there who think that there will be 100% buy-in.
00:14:39.420Because I don't think there will be at all.
00:14:41.880I think it'll be extremely low and extremely poor.
00:14:45.000And eventually, I think they're going to have to abandon the idea altogether.
00:14:51.280You know, and there's a cultural divide in that data.
00:14:54.260They said 56% of Albertans, again, the highest number polled, said that firearms ownership is an important part of their identity and their culture.
00:15:04.140I think the gun grab fuels Western separatism.
00:15:10.740When you look at the numbers out of Saskatchewan, they said that for them it was the highest number of people who said that they are unfairly targeted by federal policy at 88% in Saskatchewan.
00:15:23.240This is for firearms owners, you look and you say, well, these people don't understand who we are, and we're being unfairly blamed for rising crime in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver.
00:16:13.900And when you've done something for decades and decades and built this whole life around it, and then for somebody to say, go do something else.
00:16:22.600Nobody else is treated this way in this country.
00:16:25.620And what happens is you're going, you know, for the most part, we've had really good compliance.
00:16:31.100Gun owners have followed the rules and regulations in exchange for being able to own the things that they do.
00:16:36.280So when you move those goalposts, you're going to see less and less compliance.
00:16:48.040So, yeah, this will be an interesting thing to watch with the new prime minister and see what direction he takes it in.
00:16:56.760But so far, just like Trudeau, he's failed on this too.
00:16:59.960Yeah, I think when he chose the former head of Pauly Sissouviant to be an MP, I think that was a harbinger of things to come for the rest of us.
00:17:11.600In this federal government data too, I see they discovered something that they probably wish they hadn't.
00:17:19.400And that was that, I think it's roughly one in three respondents own more than five firearms.
00:17:27.820And most said they use them for target shooting, not hunting.
00:17:33.480So the thing the liberals always say is, what do you need this to shoot a deer?
00:17:39.700But that's not what people are doing with the firearms anyway.
00:18:33.200Again, I'm cheering so hard for government ineptitude.
00:18:37.260You know, like Mark Carney's considering austerity, whatever that looks like when you're liberal.
00:18:44.300But I think this is one of those big places that he could start.
00:18:47.440If he cares about the harmony of confederation, he better not try to pull this stuff with Western Canadians because he's going to have a fight on his hands from our premiers.
00:18:58.120And then he will be stoking the flames of Western separation.
00:19:02.160I wanted to ask you about the issue of grandfathering because it is divisive in the firearms community.
00:19:10.220Some people will say it is a concession to the other side when people find themselves through no fault of their own with banned firearms.
00:19:23.200Tell me what you've been up to on this issue.
00:19:25.940Well, if you would have told me three or four years ago that I'd be advocating for grandfathering, I would have told you you're crazy.
00:19:33.440I've always rejected it entirely because it is delayed confiscation.
00:19:39.380The reality check of the situation that we find ourselves in now is you can have delayed confiscation or you can have immediate confiscation.
00:19:46.580Now, I look at it as a temporary solution.
00:19:49.280It's something that I have been lobbying for, both with the Liberal government and encouraging Conservative lawmakers to suggest to their Liberal colleagues.
00:20:01.560And this is the normal, traditional way that bans of guns were handled.
00:20:06.400You'll remember back in the 70s, the actual assault weapons ban.
00:20:10.980People who owned full auto were—they didn't have their doors kicked in and their guns confiscated.
00:20:40.320But, I mean, we're kind of up against a rock and a hard place here.
00:20:44.320We've got either immediate confiscation by some kind of Liberal program that they slapped together.
00:20:50.300That's going to be a huge mess, cause big problems for law enforcement and gun owners alike.
00:20:55.840Or, alternatively, and be really expensive.
00:20:59.340I mean, for a government that's looking to cut 7.5% from every department, where are you going to cut in public safety other than this, right?
00:21:07.740So you can save the taxpayer billions of dollars by foregoing this whole idea of collecting people's guns that they use safely, and then using taxpayer dollars to pay them for them.
00:21:19.600In some cases, these would be tens of thousands of dollars per gun.
00:21:22.540So the idea here is, everything you own now that's been recently prohibited since May of 2020 would stay prohibited, but you would get a provision on your license to allow you to go to the range and shoot them.
00:21:37.060You and I could buy and sell between each other, you know, and other people with that same provision on their license.
00:21:42.900And then, like I said, I could leave them to my girls upon my death.
00:21:47.320So, you know, it also kicks the can down the road a little bit, buys a little more time.
00:21:53.620You know, if and when we have another election, if we have a different outcome, a more positive result, then you can look at repealing stuff.
00:22:01.000But for now, I think it's a good solution for everybody, including the Liberal government, who, as I said, is looking to put in some austerity measures.
00:22:11.780And instead of cutting funding to law enforcement or border security or, you know, stopping the flow of illicit guns across the border or fentanyl or CBSA or all of these things that, you know, need to be looked after in order to get our country on the safe track again.
00:22:28.860And the money that would have gone to, you know, angering gun owners can go to those places instead.
00:22:37.660So I think it's a better use of resources.
00:22:40.320I know some people may, you know, reel in horror at me saying that, but at the same time, take a hard reality check on where we're at.
00:22:48.980And this is this is what we're up against.
00:22:50.760So, yeah, it's something I'm working very hard on right now with my colleagues.
00:22:55.400And like I said, I think it's a temporary measure and I think it's palatable to most people.
00:23:25.220So this keeps these guns where they belong safely in the hands of their law abiding owners until such time as a future conservative government is able to make those changes.
00:23:36.560And it is a good escape hatch for the liberals optically to say, like, look, we are proceeding with our gun bans, but we are taking the financially responsible way out of this by allowing these to stay in the hands of the people who already have them.
00:23:57.020I think it's a solution that works for everybody for now.
00:24:00.180So, yeah, like I said, it's a for now thing.
00:24:15.320However, I do think there's an avenue here for a compromise, a temporary compromise.
00:24:21.420And I think if gun owners could continue to use the stuff that's been locked up for years now, I think that would be a win.
00:24:28.540People could go back out and hunt with their hunting rifles again, use their sporting rifles.
00:24:33.500Competitions could ramp up retailers, although they may not be able to stock new firearms that fall into those categories.
00:24:41.240They'd be able to stock all kinds of accessories and implements that people would buy.
00:24:46.260Like it would not be 100 percent solution, but it would be a heck of a lot better than where we are.
00:24:52.720And at the end of the day, if they don't do this and they go ahead with confiscations, the moment those guns start getting confiscated from gun owners, it doesn't matter who the leader is or which party is in power.
00:25:05.240Nobody's ever going to reel it back that far again.
00:25:07.460So, you know, that's my reality check for people who may be listening to this and saying, what is she nuts?
00:25:14.700No, I've thought long and hard about this.
00:25:16.740And, you know, it's kind of, you know, I've anguished over it, but I have to be realistic and do the best thing for gun owners.
00:25:24.860So that's the direction that we are moving forward in.
00:30:29.040Well, as always, I turn over the last portion of the show to you because without you, there's no rebel news.
00:30:34.160You've been with us for 10 plus years supporting us in a time of intense censorship while the federal government has been trying to break us.
00:35:08.140I also showed you how it was, the lies were so bad that the press secretary by 4 o'clock in the afternoon had to send out another press release demanding that the media correct their misinformation.
00:36:35.060Reporters who misrepresented the story should be penalized, their employers fined, and both prohibited from news briefings for a period of time.
00:41:02.180In my workplace, my big team was discussing how absurd it is that Alberta government banned literature in libraries educating kids about sexuality, etc.