Canadian gun grabbers have made major headway in the Great White North, and now the venerable AR-15s and similar rifles are banned, as are a lot of other firearms that most of us wouldn't think of as “assault weapons.”
Anti-gunners up that way are mostly mad that they couldn't also ban the SKS, which tells you just how insane they are.
Still, it is what it is, and while it's there and not here, what happens in Canada doesn't necessarily stay there. While they lack the Second Amendment to protect gun rights, they are just across the border with a similar enough culture that bad ideas there are likely to be imported here.
But how bad will it get? Are we looking at door-to-door confiscation?
Well, based on comments from the head of Canada's equivalent of the NRA, I wouldn't be surprised.
For a first-person account of what is going on in Canada, including what is being done to push back against this massive grab of Canadian’s freedom, The Armed Citizen Podcast reached out to Blair Hagen, executive vice president of Canada’s National Firearms Association.
“Basically, what has been happening is [our federal government is] giving people the opportunity to register their now banned order in council guns in a registry for future confiscation at some later date,” said Hagen.
Hagen explained that “at this point in time, [we estimate] 2 percent compliance. And this is voluntary compliance. The government is now scrambling to figure out what to do next.”
Hagen also noted that some people are taking these banned guns to gun ranges, despite the illegality of it, in part due to ignorance. There are thousands of particular models that have been banned, which means people have to look at the list, compare it to their own collection, then make the determination as to whether they can go to the range despite the ban on transporting these particular firearms.
And some of them are missing things and getting jammed up, at least in urban areas, Hagen explained.
As for door-to-door confiscations, Hagen seems to think it's possible, but it'll be a PR nightmare because, even if many Canadians are against gun ownership in some way, they really don't want to see their country become a police state.
That's good news, I suppose, considering just how little compliance there really was with the voluntary “buyback” nonsense.
But the idea of trusting public relations to be enough of a reason for a government not to do something like this seems like a risky bet to me.
Yet let's keep in mind what we're seeing here. Rhode Island passed an assault weapon ban just last year. They grandfathered in rifles that were already owned, just banning the sale and purchase of new ones. Just a year later, they're trying to ban possession of those guns, saying the work from 2025 isn't done yet. Nothing new has happened, mind you. None of those who were grandfathered in have flipped out and murdered people. All that's happened is a bit of time has passed, and they want to ban those weapons.
To me, it seems oddly similar to what we're seeing in Canada.
What happens when those who have the guns don't trip over themselves to comply with a ban? I promise you, they won't. Some will play nice, even while grumbling. Others will just shut their mouths and pretend they never owned one, and others will be loud about how they're not complying. I get all these takes, but either way, Rhode Island or any other state trying this will be left with the same conundrum Canada is facing.
Do they want to go door-to-door to get them or just accept that the law is being ignored by people who value their rights more than they value listening to an inane government?
Sure, right now, that's not an option, but the idea of banning entire categories of guns like this wasn't an option at a point in the not-too-distant past.
