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TOP STORY
The Trudeau government has once again rolled out a surprise gun ban, immediately declaring 324 different types of firearm to be prohibited. In an instant, Canadians who may have been using these guns for hunting or target practice now have to keep them locked up or face serious consequences. Ottawa has also promised to eventually seize the firearms as part of a buyback program, and to send some of them to the Ukrainian military.
As with the last time the Trudeau government tried to ban hundreds of firearms in one go, the list doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense if your ostensible goal is public safety.
It contains low-powered varmint guns, rare antique guns that exist only in museums, guns no deadlier than any number of legal firearms and, as detailed below, plenty of guns that are absolutely not, in the words of Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, “designed for the battlefield.”
The list has quite a few low-power .22 rifles
A bullet of any size can kill or hurt you, but .22 is generally the lowest caliber. It’s the cartridge that gets loaded into varmint guns and target practice rifles intended for minors.
So, if you were legitimately rounding up a bunch of guns “designed for the battlefield,” it would be very strange if that list contained a bunch of firearms chambered in .22 caliber.
But this one does. Most notably, the list includes the GSG-16, a .22- caliber “plinker” rifle that is occasionally sold in pink. There’s also several guns made to look like famous military rifles, but which have the very non-military capability of firing .22 bullets one at a time. That’s the story of the newly banned Mauser StG44. It’s made to resemble the Sturmgewehr 44 – generally considered the first assault rifle – but without any of the usual assault characteristics.
The government repeatedly breaks their own rules in defining “assault-style” rifle
Assault rifles are already illegal in Canada, and have been for quite some time. An actual assault rifle generally comes with automatic firing and a large-capacity magazine – neither of which are allowed. Long before Justin Trudeau ever became prime minister, rifles were limited to five rounds or less and could only have semi-automatic capability (the gun fires once with each trigger pull).
Which is why the Trudeau government instead adopted the term “assault-style,” which they officially defined in their C-21 gun control bill. Under that definition, an “assault-style” rifle is a semi-automatic rifle that uses “centre-fire” ammunition, was “designed and manufactured” after 2023, and was originally designed to hold large-capacity magazines.
Although the Trudeau government has claimed that all of the newly banned guns were chosen based on “assault-style” criteria, even a cursory examination of the list shows that not to be true. The aforementioned .22 rifles do not use centre-fire ammunition (.22 is a “rimfire” cartridge). And, as detailed below, a lot of them definitely predate 2023.
There are some very obscure museum pieces on this list
Right at the top of the ban list is the Browning M3 Aircraft, manufactured by Allied Armament. As its name suggests, it’s a 1930s-era machine gun meant to be mounted to an aircraft – and you can’t physically use it unless you have a fighter plane to work the firing system. It’s also a belt-fed machine gun, so it’s already all kinds of prohibited in Canada.
It’s safe to say that the Browning M3 Aircraft is not typically found at Canadian crime scenes, and it may have made the list simply because the world’s only man-fireable Browning M3 Aircraft is in the collection of the Canadian Historical Arms Museum.
It’s a similar deal for the six different models of SaskSten covered by the ban. Those are former WWII-era Sten machine guns modified by a Saskatchewan company to be compliant with Canadian regulations, and before they were banned it was typical to find them selling for no less than $4,000.
As with before, guns are being banned for looks, rather than capability
There’s no real consistency in the list if you’re assessing firearms based on what they can do or how powerful they are. It would be one thing if the government imposed a blanket ban on, say, semi-automatic rifles – thus forcing everyone to use slower bolt, lever or pump-action guns.
But for almost every rifle on this list, you can still find any number of legal guns that shoot just as fast, and shoot cartridges that are just as big. Most conspicuously, the Trudeau government continues to steer clear of the SKS, a Soviet-made semi-automatic infantry rifle. Despite literally being “designed for the battlefield,” it likely gets a pass simply because it’s one of the country’s most popular hunting rifles – particularly among Inuit and First Nations hunters.
It’s a fair guess that very few of these guns are getting to Ukraine
One of the weirdest (and most mocked) aspects of the ban is the claim that it’s effectively an aid program for Ukraine. “We are helping get Ukraine the weapons it needs,” said defence minister Bill Blair at an announcement this week, adding that Ukraine has said it could use some of the guns on the list.
But there’s probably not many. For starters, militaries generally like uniformity. It’s a tactical disadvantage to have each member of your unit armed with a different gun requiring different ammunition and spare parts (particularly if the gun is a museum piece manufactured in the 1930s).
And again, although it’s possible to modify some of the firearms on the list, it’s generally not advisable to go into battle with anything chambered in .22 caliber or limited to five shots at a time. The Ukrainians are probably only interested in a few of the rifles chambered for a .338 Lapua, a high-powered hunting cartridge that can be used for sniping.
And it almost certainly won’t make any difference in public safety
This ban was likely timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, which saw 14 women murdered with a legally acquired Ruger Mini-14. The Mini-14 was covered by an earlier Trudeau government ban in 2020, although — like many of the guns above — you can still find legal firearms that are just as deadly in terms of calibre and rate of fire.
But the new ban also coincides with police organizations saying rather explicitly that prior Trudeau government gun bans are not working. Both the Toronto Police Association and the Surrey Police Union issued public statements in October criticizing the Trudeau government’s “freeze” on the sale or transfer of handguns, noting that gun crime has skyrocketed in the two years since.
Why? Basically all of Canada’s crime guns are now coming in illegally via the United States, and are thus unaffected by regulatory changes to legal gun ownership.
IN OTHER NEWS
J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect of the United States, is notably best friends with Conservative MP Jamil Jivani. This week saw the first glimmer of an example of the two publicly agreeing on something political. After Jivani announced his plan for a domestic campaign to combat “anti-Christian bigotry,” Vance weighed ina with a social media post reading, “Canada has seen a number of church burnings in recent years thanks to anti-Christian bigotry. All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group. Jamil is speaking the truth.”
For basically the first time since 2016, Canada is looking at a change to assisted suicide law that isn’t simply making it easier to obtain. The Alberta government hasn’t set anything in stone, but they’re looking at a provincial oversight body for assisted suicide, and a measure for family to intervene in the MAID approval process.
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