The Second Amendment was crafted by our Founding Fathers because they knew that sooner or later, someone would probably try to take away our ability to defend ourselves from a tyrannical power.
Many of them wrote eloquently on the topic and made it clear that good, decent folks should never be prohibited from owning arms.
In time, a lot of people have come to disagree with this. They argue that our Founding Fathers couldn't have comprehended what we've created, which is nonsense. They knew good and well that we would create better weapons. They'd already seen repeating firearms and they were smart men. They knew we'd improve upon the concept.
In Canada, though, they created no such restraint on the government. The colonies that refused to rebel against tyranny saw no reason any future generations might need to do so. They created no such protections.
And now, we can see how terrible of a mistake that would have been for us.
March 30 marks the first anniversary of the release of the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report into the April 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia that left 22 people dead. It was the most thorough study of a mass shooting in Canadian history.
The non-partisan commission’s 130 recommendations included several focused on gun laws.
Over the past year, the federal government has had a mixed record in implementing the commission’s firearms policy recommendations. Some provincial governments, however, have sought to limit implementation, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has provided little indication that he will follow the commission’s recommendations if he becomes prime minister.
Firearm recommendations
Among the commission’s recommendations:
- The federal government should “amend the Criminal Code to prohibit all semi-automatic handguns and all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that discharge centre-fire ammunition and that are designed to accept detachable magazines with capacities of more than five rounds.”
- Ottawa must “take steps to rapidly reduce the number of prohibited semi-automatic firearms in circulation in Canada.”
- The federal government must close loopholes that allow gun owners to use large-capacity ammunition magazines.
- Purchasers of ammunition and magazines should possess a firearms license.
- Stronger measures need to be put in place to prevent gun possession by people involved in domestic or gender-based violence.
- Governments should adopt a public-health approach to firearms policy.
- Governments should improve efforts to combat gun smuggling.
And the Canadian government as been tripping over itself to try and enact each and every one of these measures.
Now, let's note that the Nova Scotia massacre was an attack carried out by someone who circumvented all the gun control laws already on the books in Canada multiple times. He'd illegally acquired firearms smuggled into Canada from the United States and used those attacks to murder 22 people.
And yet, how did Canada react? They started banning guns and magazines, creating burdens on the law-abiding, and virtually everything else anti-gunners here keep claiming we need to do.
The problem is that, as I already said, the guy bought guns illegally. None of these rules--and I do mean none of them--would have stopped the killer in this case.
Yet because there is no Second Amendment on the books in Canada, the Canadian government doesn't view gun ownership as a right. They feel perfectly justified in restricting guns as much as they wished because there's nothing in place to restrain them.
Some people look at the above list and think that somehow, we should do the same thing, that we would do the same thing if only we didn't have that pesky Second Amendment.
It's why we now have people like Gavin Newsom wanting a new constitutional amendment enshrining certain bits of gun control into law. It's why others have called for a repeal of the Second Amendment entirely.
Personally, I thank the Lord that we have it. Otherwise, we'd already see a lot of terrifying things come to pass that no one should want anything at all to do with.
