Four years ago, then-presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris called for a mandatory buyback on so-called assault weapons. It wasn't her first flirtation with gun bans, of course, but that was what she wanted right then and there. Now, I'm not going to quibble about the term "buyback"--no, the government never owned them so they can't buy them back, but we all know what she meant.

Now, she says she doesn't want that. She says she won't take our guns.

That's probably for the best because even without the Second Amendment issues of such a thing, there's also no reason to believe that we'd do it any better than our neighbors to the north, who have managed to spend massive amounts on a gun buyback that still hasn't bought back any guns.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was solemn and determined when, in the days after the 2020 mass murder of 22 people in Nova Scotia, he announced that his government was banning 1,500 military-style semi-automatic weapons and their accessories.

“Canadians deserve more than thoughts and prayers,” he said. He expressed urgency: the sale and possession of the listed weapons and their parts would be banned immediately, and the government would implement a buyback program to take them out of commission for good.

Four years later, there is no buyback program, and yet the government has still managed to spend $67-million on it, according to its response to a written question on the matter from Conservative senator Donald Plett.

The whole thing is such a boondoggle that even a major gun-control group has turned against it.

PolyRemembers, formed after the mass murder of 14 female students at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, this month called the buyback program “a waste of money,” because it will leave semi-automatic weapons on the market and in the hands of Canadians that are just as deadly as the ones it take out of commission.

“If our safety is important to politicians, we have to do this buyback program,” PolyRemembers spokesperson Nathalie Provost told Radio-Canada. “But if we do it, we have to do it efficiently, not just for appearances. And right now, it’s just for appearances.”

It’s hard to disagree that the government is all talk. Since that horrible moment in 2020, it has used gun control as a wedge against the Conservative opposition, which opposes most such measures, while taking little concrete action.

How badly do you have to screw up a gun control policy so that the anti-gun groups in your country and the media are going to attack you over it?

It's not that PolyRemembers opposes the gun ban. They're totally down with banning so-called assault weapons and probably everything else Canadian gun owners have in the safe.

It's that the Canadian government has implemented it so incompetently that they're bewildered and upset.

But here in the United States, we haven't exactly seen evidence that any such thing would be run more efficiently. Quite the contrary, really.

Everywhere you look, you can find evidence of government incompetence. When I worked as a contractor for the Department of Defense, one of my common comments was, "It's a miracle we haven't been invaded yet." The only saving grace is that as screwed up as everything is in the DOD, everyone else seems to be worse at it.

So while people seem to think the government can and should just implement a buyback, they need to recognize that Canada is screwing the pooch with a lot fewer guns and gun owners, as well as less of a legacy of hoisting the middle finger to authority in general. If they're creating a boondoggle instead of accomplishing the task, you're deluded if you think we'll do it better.