Outside of the United States, no other nation really has anything akin to the Second Amendment. Other nations may pay lip service to the right to keep and bear arms, but they always justify limits on that right. No one really has our protections.

The country that I’d have said was closest, at least until recently, was our neighbor to the north. Canadians have a vibrant gun culture, a love of hunting, and a great many have an appreciation for AR-15s and similar rifles.

Now, all that is changing, but a recent op-ed really nails the attitude toward gun owners by anti-gunners, not just in Canada but here as well.

The progressive dislike of handguns and certain kinds of rifles in Canada isn’t a public policy issue. It’s an ideological preference. Millions of Canadians do not understand how tight our laws already are, how they could be reasonably improved, have no interest in shooting sports and cannot fathom why anyone would feel differently. They’d rather live in a country with fewer guns. For a brief moment last year, there was a news story that gave their cause ammunition, but even when that story was completely debunked, the focus on legal guns remained. This isn’t about gun control. It’s dislike for guns and gun owners.

That’s fine. We’re all entitled to our views. But it’s important we be honest. The changes the Liberals will soon bring down will cost hundreds of millions of tax dollars, anger and inconvenience thousands of citizens and devastate a thriving sports shooting industry, but won’t stop the shootings in our cities, or, Canadian data suggests, reduce suicides. It’ll just disarm law-abiding, non-violent Canadians. That’s the goal. It always has been.

It’s not wrong. More importantly, their Liberals or our Democrats are motivated by one unassailable fact, they don’t trust us. Their disdain for guns has little to do with public safety. If it did, they’d at least acknowledge the existence of data that goes against their claims. They’d at least admit that yeah, maybe guns are used a whole lot more to defend life than to take it.

But they don’t. Instead, they simply lash out at guns in general, arguing that anyone not in favor of gun control is in favor of kids being gunned down and of families being ripped apart by violence.

It’s why it’s impossible to reason with anti-gunners, and why I’m personally of the camp that we shouldn’t even bother. Compromise won’t make them satisfied. Reason won’t be listened to. They demand nothing less than total capitulation, and that’s a problem. A big one for me, and I’m sure it is for a lot of you reading this.

The problem for anti-gunners isn’t just that criminals get guns. It’s that anyone else can get guns as well. Many of them are cocooned in their urban enclaves, oblivious to the other threats in the world and not recognizing that even if gun control solved their own problems–spoiler warning: It won’t!– there are still a lot of people who face completely different threats and have to trust guns in order to be safe.

The problem is that the world isn’t what they want it to be, so they hate us for refusing to pretend what they want is even possible.