How often are long guns, like these used in crimes? Seems that pistols and people who generally don’t follow the law are the ones we should be focusing on no?
Most of the gun crime they’re hoping to prevent is committed with illegally-smuggled or stolen firearms. This is nothing more than taking advantage of a small, politically-convenient target group that no one cares to understand.
After all, only the unhinged and right-wing fascists want “assault-style” guns, right?
Apparently I shouldn’t have my Sub2000 because it gives off evil “assault-style” radiation that’s rotting my brain and making me want to commit horrible crimes, and I need the firm, paternalistic guidance of people who are, at best, passingly familiar with the concept of which end of the gun should be pointed downrange.
They’re going to pay me “fair market value”, so it shouldn’t bother me that much, right? Set aside my selfish desires for public good and all that?
Well, aside from the fact that the government never bothered to set aside anywhere near enough money to perform any sort of reasonable buyback of these firearms, they’ve also managed to spend $67 million dollars without even getting any of them back to begin with
(This next URL is sketchy looking, but it’s a PDF report from the Parliamentary Budget Office) https://distribution-a617274656661637473.pbo-dpb.ca/4196f91c9ca790eba879bf359fc2535b02af838191712fcef827a0643d71b4a7
If you don’t want to click it (fair), the TL;DR is that the RCMP’s estimate for a complete 100%-compliant buyback would be about $225 million dollars…but the industry estimates have it closer to $756 million. Oh, and that was before the first Order-In-Council where they banned most of these firearms. Since then, lots of Canadians (like me) with R/PALs went out and bought replacements in the form of these “variants” which will also now need to be bought back.
Even worse, none of this takes into account the idea that people have spent tons of time and money on all sorts of things related to these firearms, including:
Ammunition
Not everyone has multiple guns that use the same calibre of ammo! Ammunition is expensive and reselling it is quickly going to become impossible when no one wants to buy guns anymore.
Accessories
Super expensive optics, grips, stocks, aftermarket parts, all of which are now nowhere near as valuable in a market that will rapidly be shrinking as people give up on trying to buy new rifles again.
Clubs, Memberships and Competitions
Did you just spend $225 to enter a pistol-calibre carbine competition? Well, guess that’s getting refunded! …Unless you were an international competitor, in which case, they’re still going to be doing it without you…and probably won’t refund you (maybe, some of them are pretty cool, who knows?)
Maybe you dropped a big chunk of change on a club membership that had facilities that accommodated safe use of these firearms, and now you don’t have any firearms to safely use there. If you’re most of the way through the year, what are the odds that they’ll give you a partial refund for the membership? Not likely, given there’s nothing stopping you from taking a bolt-action rifle there…yet.
You wanna know the worst part of all of this? I’m not politically conservative at all. Trans rights are human rights! You wanna have a dog-pile orgy with twenty of your closest friends? Are they all of age and capable of informed consent? Get tested first and go for it!
So, I either vote against my hobby to protect everyone else from the CPC’s braindead platform, or I do something stupid and vote for PP to keep my guns (and he’ll probably do nothing to reverse any of this anyway, so obviously that’s not really an option).
I guess the dozens of us socially-liberal gun owners can go fuck ourselves, as long as the guns aren’t scary and black.
By the way, I own a rifle that’s still functionally identical to some of the guns banned under this new OIC. Really, they should just pass a law banning all semi-automatic firearms for civilian ownership, instead of this whack-a-mole crap where people have to gamble with their money to find out if they’re going to be allowed to own it for any length of time.
Overall I agree. I was eyeballing that white Kriss vector from cabelas. Not anymore… I will continue to vote ndp because it’s more important than firearms, but this oic is poorly done, and doesn’t effectively combat gun crimes.
I’m glad they pressured the Liberal party into pushing universal dental through; that was a damn necessary change and no one should need to think of their teeth as “luxury bones”. Still wish they’d had the balls to dissent on this, even if they didn’t threaten anything over it, but I suspect it’s because they don’t see a problem with it either.
Getting the ndp in will effectively reduce crime. You want to reduce crime, you need to address the root cause. Robust social services, equitable pay, housing and food security will reduce all forms of crime. The ndp want to bring that about. Performative gun bans won’t address a god damn thing.
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There was a Revisionist History episode of the gun control failings in the US and this smells much the same. Boiled down, politicians trying to regulate things they don’t understand, leading to ineffective regulation and unintended consequences.
Performative legislating on guns, yet again. Nothing will be fixed but they’ll pat themselves on the back yet again for accomplishing nothing except make legal gun owners suffer.
How the hell they can be so proud and supportive when these laws fails to prevent future gun crimes is ridiculous. I wonder if a class action lawsuit is possible under unreasonable restriction with no evidence to reduce gun crimes mixed with a bit of wasting tax payer money on the wrong solutions.
The money spent on this program could have been used to go after smugglers, research where the guns are coming from, work cross border with other agencies or 1000 other ways this money could have been spent better to reduce gun crimes.
Really gotta keep restricting legal gun owners, clearly they are the ones commiting the gun crimes. Shouldn’t this money have been used to counter handgun smuggling or investigate illegal gun smugglers instead of targeting the group that statistically rarely ever commits a gun crime? Can the government even afford to buyback all the weapons? Does the government even know who owns what?
So now what are we supposed to do when the americans invade
Bite’em.
