You can see a large part of the reason why our Founding Fathers made the effort to put our Second Amendment’s 27 words into the U.S. Bill of Rights by looking north of our border. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has decided to strip his citizens of their ability to own and use popular semi-automatic firearms.
Trudeau cited public safety concerns as the reason for the ban even as the he admitted that the vast majority of Canadian gun owners were law-abiding citizens.
“You do not need an AR-15 to take down a deer,” said Trudeau. “So, effective immediately, it is no longer permitted to buy, sell, transport, import or use military-grade, assault weapons in this country.”
Canadian gun owners will have a two-year “amnesty” period in which they can still possess the many firearms being banned and as the Canadian government works out plans to remove the firearms. According to CBC News, Trudeau said gun owners would receive “fair compensation” for the soon-to-be-illegal firearms.
What’s on the list? Every AR-style rifle one could think of, plus AR pistols. The list even includes military weapons one would assume were already illegal for civilian possession in Canada (and elsewhere), including rocket and grenade launchers, anti-tank rifles and mortars!
Since the vast majority of Canadian firearms owners are law-abiding citizens, what Trudeau is doing is taking away the property of law-abiding people.
“Taking firearms away from law-abiding citizens does nothing to stop dangerous criminals who obtain their guns illegally,” Canadian Opposition Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said in a statement. “The vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained firearms. Nothing the Trudeau Liberals announced today addresses this problem.”
Sound familiar? Anti-gun politicians cite public safety as the reason for ever more gun control, and yet the new gun laws they propose only impact law-abiding citizens, do little to nothing to stop criminals from acquiring and using firearms and, in the process, the new proposals can and do turn the law-abiding into criminals.
In the U.S., constitutional protection (the Second Amendment) prevents a politician from effectively using an executive order to take this freedom from us.
Now, as we near November’s election, it’s worth noting that Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, would nominate justices to the U.S. Supreme Court—should any vacancies occur—who would vote to effectively erase the Second Amendment. We know this because the U.S. Supreme Court’s minority opinions in Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010) clearly told us that, if they had a majority on the court, they’d turn our individual right to keep and bear arms into a collective one that legislators could then ignore.
