Canada isn’t the United States. Because of how the laws work up that way, they can enact gun bans, something that really isn’t likely to hold up down this way.

Yet there are those who will continue to try and do just that.

In the Toronto Star, they have a piece about the “dark history” of a particular firearm that they’re shocked isn’t more tightly regulated. They cite horrific acts carried out by this gun, of course, and it’s clear that this article is an attempt to press the government to ban this particular model.

The model in question? The SKS.

The semi-automatic rifle used to kill two South Simcoe police officers on Tuesday night carries a “bloody record,” according to a Canadian gun control expert.

The province’s Special Investigations Unit confirmed this week that investigators had recovered the Soviet-designed SKS rifle at the scene.

It’s still unknown if the SKS was legally owned and if police were aware the 23-year-old gunman was armed.

The SKS has featured in shooting deaths in Canada for decades. In the summer of 2019, it was the gun involved in a weeks-long, cross-country manhunt after two teenagers killed three travellers in northern British Columbia.

However, the SKS was left off the list of more than 1,500 semi-automatic guns the federal Liberal government prohibited from selling, importing or using in May 2020. It’s also nonrestricted, which means, unlike many other semi-automatic weapons, owners do not have to register the gun with the RCMP.

“If you have a basic firearm license, anyone can buy it,” explains Blake Brown, author of “Arming and Disarming the Nation: A History of Gun Control in Canada.”

“We don’t really know how many there are or who has them,” continued Brown, a history professor at St. Mary’s University. “But they have been used in quite a few shootings.”

Including, in recent years, multiple incidents that have left Canadian police officers dead.

Now, all of this is designed to make the SKS sound as scary as humanly possible.

Let’s look at the rifle for a second and we can really see how this goes.

The SKS is a semi-automatic rifle chambered in 7.62×39 and developed by the Soviet Union and made by countries like Romania, Yugoslavia, and China. It features an internal 10-round magazine and many include things like integral bayonets, though China did make one model that used AK-47 magazines.

When compared to something like the AR-15 and semi-automatic hunting rifles, it’s even more like hunting weapons currently on the market because of the ammunition capacity and lack of external magazines.

Yet Canada has already banned AR-15s, so now the media is turning its attention to something like the SKS.

I will say the SKS has one thing going for it as a target that the AR-15 doesn’t. It was an actual weapon of war. I have one my father brought back from Vietnam as evidence of its use in that conflict.

But that’s about it.

I mean, hell, you don’t even need a standard FFL to have one of these shipped to your home here in the United States. A Curios & Relics license is sufficient.

The truth is that these really are no different than many hunting weapons. They have a limited magazine capacity–the 10-rounds we’re typically told are all any law-abiding citizen should ever need–and are semi-automatic, not full-auto or anything of the sort.

In fact, they make halfway decent deer rifles and were great for that when you could buy them for less than $100 a pop.

So why demonize it?

Because it’s next.

That’s it. That’s the reason. Canada has already banned AR-15s and put a freeze on the lawful sale of handguns. Now, it’s the SKS that’s being treated as the source of all evil, though any effort to restrict it is unlikely to just cover SKS rifles and variants.

No, now it’ll be a ban on semi-auto rifles or something of that sort.

Then it’ll be semi-auto shotguns and maybe even pump-action ones, too. Their role with the military and police will likely be bought up as to why they’ll be inappropriate for civilian ownership.

Next, it’ll be bolt-action hunting rifles…excuse me, “sniper rifles.” That’s how they’ll attack them and how they’ll justify restricting those as their next gun ban.

And make no mistake, folks, just because this is happening in Canada doesn’t mean someone won’t try it here. Yes, we have the Second Amendment and the Bruen decision, but the right to bear arms was ignored for years and the Bruen decision could be overturned by the Court at some point in the future.

If that happens, this is the playbook they’ll follow here to enact a gun ban.

We cannot allow it to happen.

The SKS is just a step on the gun ban trail.