The triumph of politics over policy behind Liberals’ ‘ ban’ on ‘assault weapons.’
The crackdown on legal firearms ownership, which was announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday, is another shining moment in the long history of dysfunctional Canadian gun control proposals. It will accomplish nothing in particular, but will come at considerable public expense. It will not improve public safety, nor will it will please either side of this contentious debate.
What it will do is give both Liberals and Conservatives an opportunity to fundraise off the issue — one could be forgiven for wondering if that’s literally the only point to any of this. So, again: a textbook example of Canadian gun control politics.
The government announced that it is “banning“1,500 different kinds of “assault weapons.” That sounds impressive. It’s not — not a ban, and not impressive. It’s really 11 types of rifles, each with many, many different versions produced by different manufacturers — that’s where the 1,500 figure comes from. None of the weapons are a true military- type rifle, capable of fully automatic fire or equipped with high- capacity magazines, which have been banned in Canada for decades. The list is really a grab bag of fairly mundane semi- automatic rifles. It’s hardly an exhaustive list — many other comparable rifles were unaffected by the announcement. The only real thing that binds these rifles together is a link to prominent mass shootings ( and even that isn’t the case for all of them).
In short, the Liberals have “banned” some guns, ignored a bunch of other comparable ones and called it a day. This is going to outrage the gun owners and the shooting industry, infuriate the anti-gun activists and do little else.
It certainly won’t improve public safety, which is the theoretical justification for all of this. Gun owners will be given two years to choose what to do with their rifles (selling them back to the government, at public expense, is an option, and if everyone chose to do that, it could cost hundreds of millions, if not billions). But the Liberals also say they’ll let existing owners keep their firearms — a socalled “grandfathering” of the thousands of Canadians who already own these rifles. This is similar to the previous big 1990s-era revamp of Canadian gun laws under thenprime minister Jean Chrétien — thousands of “banned” guns were left in the hands of their owners, where many of them remain today, even as sales were stopped.
How can one claim a gun must be banned in the interests of public safety while also granting that the current owners of those very guns are not a threat to public safety, so they can keep them without risk to society? It’s inherently contradictory.
And it’s not the only failure in the Liberals’ logic here. In one bizarre moment at the Friday press conference, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair breezily declared that the “banned” rifles are not used for hunting, shortly before Justice Minister David Lametti announced that there would be exemptions from the ban for some Indigenous communities, where the rifles are needed for … hunting. So that was odd. But these individual glitches in the Liberal brain trust obscure the broader problem with all their bluster: this is now the third time in a row that, despite their huffing and puffing, the Liberals have admitted that lawful Canadian gun owners are not a threat to public safety, and that our current gun control laws are working.
That’s not what they say, of course. But it’s what they do. First, there was Bill C-71, a piece of legislation from Trudeau’s first term. The Liberals, to their credit, did their homework on that one. They spent years crafting it, sought expert advice, went through all the usual committees and eventually rolled out a piece of legislation that … changed very little. Yes, there were some changes to the existing laws contained in Bill C-71 — some good, some bad. But it was a surprisingly modest effort, and the Liberals then dragged their feet on implementing it. Despite the soaring rhetoric about public safety, it was an admission that the status quo was working — why else would they study the issue in great detail, announce only minor changes and then basically forget about it?
The next admission came directly from the lips of Bill Blair. After months of studying the possibility of a handgun ban, the Liberals decided one wasn’t necessary. Blair told the Globe and Mail last June that a handgun ban "would be potentially a very expensive proposition … it would not in my opinion be perhaps the most effective measure in restricting the access that criminals would have to such weapons, because we’d still have a problem with them being smuggled across the border.” The Liberals may give more powers to cities to restrict the storage of firearms within city limits, but a national ban? It wouldn’t help, as even the Liberals now admit.
And now this — a “ban” that targets some rifles but not other comparable ones, and doesn’t really even ban those.
This will let the Liberals declare that they’ve done something, and it’ll no doubt feature prominently in their next fundraising email blast. But read between the lines of all these bills and proposals and you’ll see the truth: the Liberals know that lawful Canadian gun owners aren’t a problem, but they’ll use them as a convenient money- filled pinata every time the party’s coffers run low, with the public picking up the tab.
It makes for great political theatre. But let’s be clear what it is: this isn’t policy; it’s politics — at your expense.