Matt Gurney: The Liberals' useless 'assault weapons' ban
                                                                             
                                                                                    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
                                                                             
                                                                                    The crackdown on legal firearms ownership, which was announced by  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on May 1, 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).
                                                                                    
                                                                                    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  so-called “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 then-prime 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.
                                                                                    
nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-gurney-the-liberals-useless-assault-weapons-ban