Canadian gun owners starting to sound like Americans

AP Photo/Michael Conroy

Americans are a defiant lot. We wear that defiance on our sleeves. Even the people telling you to comply with various things right now will be more than happen to don the mantle of defiance as soon as their guy is out of the White House.

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This is the American way. It’s especially true when you’re talking about gun owners. I mean, why do many of us have guns? So we can be defiant if our government turns tyrannical.

But Canadians aren’t like that. They’re the British colonies who wanted nothing to do with the American Revolution. They’re nice and polite and compliant with the law.

Or, we should make that as they were compliant with the law.

Canadians still have a few months left in order to turn in their banned firearms — the amnesty expires April 30 — before they become felons. And how’s that process going?

Only 160 firearms that the Liberal government prohibited more than a year and a half ago have been deactivated or surrendered, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. …

“The Canadian Firearms Program (CFP) can confirm that, as of Dec. 9, 2021, 18 firearms (formerly classified as restricted) affected by the May 1, 2020, Order in Council (OIC) have been deactivated,” added Sgt. Caroline Duval, the spokesperson who forwarded the Mounties’ response.

“In addition, there have been 142 OIC-affected firearms recorded as surrendered to a public agency for destruction since May 1, 2020.”

The official excuse for the minuscule compliance rate that’s being put forward by officials and supporters is that the government has yet to come up with details for a buyback program they promised for the outlawed guns. Compliant Canadians are just waiting for that to be put into place. Then they’ll rush to their local RCMP outpost and toss their gats in the barrel.

Uh huh. If you believe that, I have some beachfront property in Saskatchewan I’d like to talk to you about.

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Yeah, I’m with author Dan Zimmerman on this one.

Now, let’s understand that Canadians like their AR-15 style rifles about as much as Americans. I know a lot of Canadians who had them well prior to Trudeau coming into office. I’m sure these were all lost in tragic boating accidents by now, of course.

Frankly, this is heartening.

Canada doesn’t have our Second Amendment. This allows the Canadian government to treat guns as a privilege to be bestowed rather than a right to be cherished and protected. It would be easy to believe that Canadian gun owners would be more amenable to having guns taken by the government than American gun owners would.

And yet, this just doesn’t seem to be the case.

There’s a lesson here for the American gun grabbers, to be sure. See, if Canadians with their cultural differences – and while we may have cultural similarities, there are profound differences, especially when it comes to guns – are uninterested in complying with an assault weapon ban, why in the world would you believe Americans would be more compliant?

It just ain’t happening.

Instead, what you see outlined above as happening in Canada would be amplified a thousandfold here in the US. I’m rather proud of that fact, actually.

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Gun owners here aren’t interested in playing nice. We’re not the polite, go-along to get-along crowd. We’re completely uninterested in playing well with those who hate us, as most gun control fans seem to do.

Don’t believe me? Look at New York, where they had remarkably few guns registered when that was all that was required after the SAFE Act was passed. People just ignored the law. It was kind of beautiful, really.

Try that here on the national scale and what you’ll see is just how few people will comply with anything of the sort.

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Tom Knighton 11:29 AM | December 13, 2024