Who do Albas and gun owners want to assault?

Re: Trudeau’s gun bill won’t stop criminals (MP report by Dan Albas, June 3).

I had to shake my head at the explanation given by Dan Albas for the term assault rifle. His lament that gun owners are unfairly treated because of the appearance of their weapons is another typically lame argument by the gun lobby.

The Oxford dictionary tells us the noun “assault” means: violent attack that threatens physical harm to a person. The term assault rifle describes the purpose of the gun’s design. The fact that they may vary in style, magazine size and quality of construction is irrelevant.

Who do purchasers intend to assault? A single-shot squirrel rifle or a Winchester repeating rifle or a .303 hunting rifle are descriptive terms, too — their design is not intended for assault.

A Colt 30 shot semi-automatic AR-15 is designed for law enforcement, from the same platform as the U.S. military’s M-16, designed for the purpose of assaulting an enemy. It is not designed for civilian target practice or hunting food. In fact, it is out of place in the public sphere.

If you want the thrill of firing automatic weapons, join the military. To say a semiautomatic assault rifle is not designed as an offensive weapon is to lie.

Critics may say it is people not guns that kill, but this ignores the obvious fact that the availability of guns increases that likelihood.

What happened to the buy-back program? COVID and an election happened.

I don’t know if Albas remembers, but in the last year of the gun registry, 2010, data showed that half the guns confiscated in the commission of a crime by the RCMP, were listed as stolen on the registry, from either vehicle break-ins or home burglaries.

It showed only half our problem comes from cross border smuggling. Constantly going on about cross border smuggling hides half our gun problem.

Since Confederation, Canada has maintained strict gun regulations and that is the main reason for the vastly different gun culture between Canada and the Untied States.

Any additional legislation to get more guns out of the hands of the public, the better.

Jon Peter Christoff, West Kelowna