More Illogical Gun Bans For Canada
Canadian gun owners just took another hockey stick to the crotch over the weekend, as the Liberal-led government banned 172 more rifles and shotguns with seemingly little logic behind the action besides pandering to gun-control advocates.
Canadian Gun News @ TFB:
The Ban Announcement
Originally, Canadian shooters expected the announcement of further firearm bans on the final day of February, as the Liberals had promised more restrictions by the end of that month. Instead, the federal firearms website went down for maintenance, and the actual ban announcement did not come until March 7.
Coverage of the ban was difficult, with the actual list of firearms delayed, and Canada’s main print firearms magazine, Calibre, denied media access by the Parliamentary Press Gallery. When the actual announcement came from Associate Public Safety Minister Rachel Bendayan, the French part of the announcement led to considerable confusion, with many left believing the popular SKS rifle was going to be banned.
As it turned out, once the speech was translated properly, the SKS is not banned, with the government saying this is because so many natives use it for hunting. However, 179 other firearms are banned, apparently after being fingered as “weapons of war.”
What’s Really Banned
But a closer look at the list reveals firearms that are, once again, banned solely on appearance. The Chiappa M1-9 carbine, which has never fought any battles except a self-inflicted war against its own magazine angle, is banned. So is the Chiappa M1-22, a .22LR rifle that was built to shoot tin cans, not soldiers. The Torro EM1, another rimfire lookalike of the M1, is also banned, despite the fact that nobody except the crustiest of gun geeks has ever heard of one. This trend continues through the list, with some rifles named that probably came into Canada in insignificant numbers; indeed, there may be none of them in-country.
They did go after some relatively popular rifles, including World War II and Cold War-era rifles. Several M1 Carbine variants patterned after the service rifle are named in the ban, along with the Russian SVT-40 rifle, along with Ljungman AG42, the Rashid carbine, the VZ52 and even the Globe Firearms Mohawk, a post-War abomination that saw SVTs converted to .303 British-chambered sporters.
In other words: A long list of firearms that were popular with collectors and hunters, and not the weapon of choice for gangbangers. And yet, the same Liberal government that says it is cracking down on crime and beating the drum of armament against rising geopolitical tensions is now banning law-abiding shooters’ firearms, and making it clear there are more laws to come as a federal election potentially looms.
There are more magazine restrictions coming, potentially a resurrection of the same five-round restrictions that scared Canadian Fudds a couple of years back, when poorly-worded legislation threatened any Canadian firearm with capacity over five rounds. Winchester 94, Lee Enfield, Remington Wingmaster—no matter what firearm you had, if it could be loaded with more than five rounds in the mag, the government was going to require permanent alterations that made that impossible, until mass uproar saw some changes to the legislation.
In the recent flurry of firearms regulations, all passed without parliamentary or senate approval since neither house has been sitting for months, Canadians also got new yellow-flag laws. These see provincial Chief Firearms Officers allowed to temporarily suspend a firearms license “if they suspect the licence holder is no longer eligible.” There was also a promise of new firearms classification that will follow recommendations from “expert advisory panel and industry representatives.” Presumably these are the same experts who banned the Mossberg 715T rimfire plinker, deeming it a dangerous weapon of war, and who suggested banned firearms should be shipped to armed Ukrainian soldiers once seized. No doubt the arrival of such .22LR rifles would have made quite an impression upon their arrival in the trenches.
What’s Next?
Stay tuned. Gun control has long been a go-to strategy for the Canadian left to whip up its voter base, and if the leadership decides to roll the dice on an election, this is sure to become an issue just as it did in the 2021 election. In that showdown, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s perceived flip-flop on firearms issues lost him votes from the hardcore right and centrists alike, and there has been very little sign that current CPC leader Pierre Poilievre will do much to reduce the legal morass surrounding firearms in Canada today, or reverse many of the bans that have been enacted since 2020.
Those bans have not come into full force, with private owners seeing an amnesty until October of 2025, although businesses have started turning firearms in as required. If an election happens before fall, a Conservative government may prolong the amnesty or reverse the bans, but a left-leaning government, whether a minority or majority, will almost see through the work they started five years ago, and remove most or all semi-autos from the Canadian market, along with many other firearms.
Professional hoser with fudd-ish leanings.
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Perhaps there is a "Soros" inspired / Bought platform funneling Canadian $$$ to this Move ?
There comes a point at which disobedience becomes mandatory if one wishes to remain free.