GUNTER: Trudeau's AR-15 ban is about perception, not reality
Lorne Gunter
Published: October 4, 2019
Updated: October 4, 2019 4:37 PM EDT
Being frightened because law-abiding Canadians own “assault” rifles is just as irrational (and just as prejudiced) as worrying about men with long, dark beards and kufis moving into your neighbourhood.
Just because a gun looks scary doesn’t make it a threat to public safety any more than looking Muslim makes someone a terrorist.
Yet scary looks – superficial features – are the motivation for the Liberals’ campaign promise to ban AR-15s and other “military-style assault rifles.”
I’m not a gun owner. Guns interest me purely on a political/philosophical level: I don’t trust any government that doesn’t trust my law-abiding neighbours to own guns. (Who’s in charge here, anyway?)
Being a non-owner means I don’t instantly understand the mechanics of firearms. But when I don’t understand, unlike a Liberal prime minister, I ask, I don’t assume.
And lots of people with a very much better understanding of guns have told me there are plenty of rifles that look more like hunting guns than army guns, yet nonetheless have the same firepower and capacity as AR-15s.
In other words, how a gun looks has little to do with how it performs relative to other models.
But the Liberals are proposing to ban certain models based solely on looks. That means the government is not serious about public safety. They are not worried about the potential of some guns to cause more death and destruction than other guns. They’re just worried about perceptions.
They are not banning AR-15s because they have been involved in a lot of crimes or because, in and of themselves, they are especially dangerous. If the Trudeau-ites were serious, they’d ban deer-hunting variants of the AR-15 with similar innards but without the military-looking muzzles, grips and sights. The deer-hunters fire just as many bullets just as fast and just as powerfully.
Instead, the Liberals’ intent is solely to make some grand symbolic gesture. They want to be able to boast to uninformed voters that they are taking steps to make them safer.
The Liberal policy will do nothing to stop criminals. It will amount to nothing more than virtue signalling that costs taxpayers hundreds of millions and confiscates private property from law-abiding gun owners who are no threat to anyone.
Toronto may have a gun crime problem (which I’m pretty sure is why this issue has even been raised during the campaign). So far this year there have been 342 shootings in Canada’s largest city. That’s more than all of last year.
But most of those are related to the drug trade or some other crime, and most involve handguns almost certainly acquired illegally from the U.S.
So just what good will it do to take away an AR-15 from a recreational shooter in Cape Breton? Moreover, how is it fair to the Cape Breton gun owner to be punished for gang violence in T.O.?
There are around 60,000 AR-15s registered in Canada right now. If they were ever going to be a threat to public safety, they would be already. So doesn’t it stand to reason that if that many “scary” guns aren’t currently a threat, then banning them will be meaningless?
Another thing, the Liberals’ math on their proposed buyback of assault rifles doesn’t add up.
The Liberals have proposed spending $250 million tax dollars to pay current legal owners to turn over their AR-15s and other assault rifles. That’s $250 million for more than 60,000 guns.
The New Zealand government tried something similar this spring after the appalling mass murder of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch. Except they set aside approximately $160 million Canadian for 14,000 guns.
That’s nearly three times as much per gun, yet owners still would not give up their rifles.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-trudeaus-ar-15-ban-is-about-perception-not-reality
An exceptionally good article.
