r/canadaguns • u/AutoModerator • Feb 06 '23

Weekly Politics Thread

Please post all your Politics or Ban-related ideas, initiatives, comments, suggestions, news articles, and recommendations in this thread. Unless new information is published in the media, recurring articles related to the gov'ts ***possible*** legislation are to be posted here. These threads will be weekly, until it's necessary for another per-week.

Previous politics threads can be found here. Previous threads can be found here.

We understand that politics is a touchy subject, and at times things can get heated. A reminder of the subreddit rules, when commenting, where subreddit users are expected to abide.

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23

Copied and pasted this because I feel like it's worth restating. Last week was great but our community needs to start pushing hard with this momentum and settling for scraps won't cut it.

1) Being happy with pre 2020 conditions, or preserving the status quo in all aspects needs to stop. Firearms needs to be seen as a right, or at least so prevalent in Canadian culture that it can't be used as a scapegoat. It's only a matter of time until C21 2.0 arrives.

2) Sports shooting, sporting rifle, etc is language that needs to be avoided. It creates a low ceiling and shaky ground for gun owners to argue in and around. Haybinger949 said it best:

"Yeah, imagine being actively targeted and vilified by almost every federal political party and media agency for the better part of 50 years and thinking your best defense is to willingly categorize yourself as no different than something as superfluous as someone who collects matchbox cars or plays frisbee golf".

Point is, it looks ridiculous when all we do is say "loog at us :DDD"

3) Overall, gun owners need to shift the culture from a hobby / casual past time to a lifestyle and everything else that comes with it.

E: I forgot to add but continuing down the sports shooting narrative will eventually paywall us and make gun culture here exclusive to rich old people similar to how it is in some euro countries. I think we're already seeing it with the NDP being pro-handgun ban except for "high level" sports shooting and ultimately pro-AR15 ban.

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u/FunkyFrunkle Feb 06 '23

There’s an opening too, since the liberals begrudgingly admitted to hunting and self defence. If guns * can’t* be used for self defence, why do police have them?

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u/CenturionV Feb 06 '23

Can't as in they think it should be illegal to do so, not can't as in it isn't possible. As far as the liberals are concerned, you dying in a violent home invasion is better than having Canadians legally use guns for self defense. They barely even want the police using their guns to defend themselves or others let alone normal people.

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u/Rook_Defence Feb 06 '23

Do you have a link to the self defence bit? I saw something where Mendicino talked about "personal defence" when talking with an indigenous group, but that seemed ambiguous enough that it could have been related to ornery wildlife rather than murderous people.

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u/FunkyFrunkle Feb 06 '23

That’s probably what it was. There’s a couple of brief interviews out there where they mention personal defence but I can’t remember which ones. They’re out there.

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u/Rook_Defence Feb 06 '23

Yeah, I remember being really surprised when I saw that, but then I looked at it again from a "where are the weasel words" perspective and I was less enthused.

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '23

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '23

Even worse. We're gonna keep seeing bills like these again and again and again and again until our right to bear arms is codified

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u/Rook_Defence Feb 07 '23

I don't look at it that way. Maybe you can clarify for me what you mean by "lifestyle and all that comes with it" but at present I really don't see the advantage to the culture shift you're describing.

Making gun culture exclusive to rich elites is obviously bad. Making gun culture exclusive to people who are committed to making it the central part of their lives is also bad. I would be over the moon for there to be an extra million new gun owners in Canada even if they only had a 10/22. That's a million new skeptics, a million more voices, and a million examples of how gun owners are trustworthy.

If gun ownership has to be less casual than it is now, then by definition, it will be less popular than it is now. The smaller the gun owning population gets, the easier it is to dismiss, ostracize, and demonize.

Hobbysit gun owners can still write letters, leave comments, introduce new people to shooting, and most importantly, demonstrate to their friends and family that it is totally boring and normal to own a gun. If someone says "man, those gun nuts are all a bunch of psychos. Only a sicko would ever want to own a gun" the people they're talking to think of the casual gun owner they know, not about the most recent deranged lunatic they heard about across the border.

In summary, I think you're underestimating the value of having casual, accessible elements of the gun community.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23

I can't quote properly on phone

1) the hobbyist / sports shooting aspect to gun ownership seems to be the ceiling for most of us. As in there can't and shouldn't be more to it than shooting recreationally. I'm arguing there needs to be greater significance to gun ownership that extends past paper punching and hunting otherwise

a) we see a threepeat of OIC, handgun freeze and C21 semi auto ban again

b) never gaining ground, only reclaiming

2) agreed. My entire point is there's more on the line than just sports shooting

3) depends on how you look at it. I've said it before but fluffing up numbers with a million people who bail at the slightest inconvenience... not worth a lot. Generalizing obviously but I hope you see my point

4) yep

There's nothing wrong with casual aspects of gun ownership. This entire thing ranging from bench shooting to hunting to larping with nods. all of it should be considered casual. My argument is that it feels as though we're stuck on bench shooting and hunting because people are either afraid of or look down on* the third and final part, which is what I don't understand.

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u/humanefly on Feb 07 '23

The sports shooting community should have made a much greater effort to target video game players IMO, that way the younger generation would have more of a connection to the sport.

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u/RaHarmakis Feb 06 '23

I disagree pretty completely with this.

Pre 2020 regulations worked pretty well from a public safety perspective. Having a robust licensing and background checks isgood, and we should be championing them. These regulations are a big part of why we can honestly say we are the most law-abiding segment of Canadian society.

In the end, as a group, we need to appear more sane than those that oppose us. Ranting about 2A style rights, will get us less than nowhere. We need to continue focusing on how safe we are as group, and how regulations don't impact those that make Canadians unsafe.

No one wants the unregulated clusterfuck that some of the USA is, as they see it as significantly less safe than we are.

The Canadian Psyche for good or bad hinges on the idea that we are not/better than the Amaericans.

All of the fights that we are in now are because of the US and the population not wanting us to be like the US. They don't understand the system we had before, but they know they don't want the system in the US that appears to be actively producing mass shootings at an unacceptable rate. Advocating for anything that looks like the US regulatory system will play right into the Liberal hands.

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u/throwa37 Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23

Advocating for anything that looks like the US regulatory system will play right into the Liberal hands.

In the short term, arguably. But in the long term, the gun discussion being dominated entirely by the sportsman argument is what got us exactly to where we are today, so it's not like it can get much worse.

Notice that the narrative around C-21 didn't change - and the Liberals had no intention of withdrawing the amendments from C-21 - until the discussion shifted to the rights of rural and indigenous Canadians, and how it would impact the weapons necessary for their way of life. Ultimately, to get to where we want to go, taking the guns has to be seen as a violation of the rights of the people, not a mere revocation of their "sporting privileges". Only now are we starting to move in this direction, and we're already seeing results.

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u/Haybinger949 12(7) Feb 06 '23

The thing is, these ideals of licensing and background checks existed for along time, they were literally around before the Firearm's Act even existed. The system used to approve and distribute PALs, while slightly different, was already being used for the FAC pre 1990s.

When considering this is what "everyone loves/appreciates about Canadian common sense gun laws", then suddenly you start to realize that 90% of the laws to follow, are in fact nonsense and only serve as a means to further civil disarmament.

There is a short book, perhaps more of an expanded pamphlet, called: Observations On A One-Way Street: The Canadian Firearm Control Debate. It was presented and distributed by a combination of organizations (NFA, IPSC, CSAAA, etc.) in Canada in the early 1990s as a voice against C-68/The Firearm's Act. You argued:

We need to continue focusing on how safe we are as group, and how regulations don't impact those that make Canadians unsafe.

This book literally made this exact argument, it contains detailed statistics, charts and tables alongside other international examples to parallel Canada. Things we always espouse about our lower crime incidence rate, the minimal quantity of legal guns used in actual crime, plummeting homicide rates outside of organized crime and so on. This has already been the attempted strategy since the beginning of most of the modern gun control movement. And it didn't stop a damn thing.

While I accredit C-68 with *a few* marginal benefits in giving national clarity on regulations, the majority of the bill that wasn't already in some form of law was just laying out firearms prohibitions and the mechanisms to continue to enact them. It's time to push back on a different front, or history will just repeat itself.

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u/RaHarmakis Feb 06 '23

I do understand how you feel. I will agree that a line does need to be drawn somewhere where we, as a group, say "no further."

For me, it was the pre-2020 regulations. The, once that line is recovered, we can then work to highlight the parts of the regulations that serve no one. It's a palatable goal that can be sold to the masses without spooking them back to the Liberal camp.

We can agree to disagree where that line is.

My only caution is that Over Reaching is a two-way street that is full of pit falls. This time, the Liberals over reached, but I do think it's very possible for the gun communities to overreach, and the consequences of us over reaching, and fully loosing the support of the majority, will be absolutely catastrophic to us.

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u/RaHarmakis Feb 06 '23

Further: This is a debate that we always need to have in a rational way. All sides of the Gun Community need to keep each other honest. If my thoughts set us on a slippery slope, you need to voice that concern, and if your thoughts will set up a critical overreach, then it's up to me to define how! The best path likley lays somewhere between us, and we need to keep looking for that best way.

In the end, we are on the same team fighting the same fight.

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23

"Pre 2020 regulations worked pretty well ... having a robust licensing system and background checks is good"

Sure. But they only open up the potential to be abused seeing how C21 is going. It needs to be re-done otherwise we're in for another round of nonsense whenever a Liberal government is re-elected.

"As a group we need to appear more sane than the opposition. Ranting about 2A-style rights will get us nowhere ... we need to emphasize how safe [gun owners] are as a group"

We already do. I can't imagine a more sane group considering we have police chiefs and academics arguing for us but no one seems to listen for more than a few minutes. Secondly, the 2A and gun culture down south are the two reasons as to why guns will never disappear in the US. We don't have the luxury of having our right to bear arms recognized and codified, so it's going to be a constant push and pull (and therefore a political issue) until then.

As for your last point, yeah. We're in this mess because of single celled organisms who import American issues into our border and simultaneously claim they don't want to be American. Again, winning hearts and minds and shifting our gun culture. We can't keep beating the same drum when that drum has been used to hit us in the face. It won't work anymore.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

1) so either change the culture or get us as close to a 2A as possible. As I said in a previous reply, I do not understand why treating sports shooting as the absolute limit to gun ownership here is seen as the only way to go about things when it literally led us to the OIC and C21

2) changing and winning hearts and minds

3) already have been. CCFR, NFA and all the rest have been doing a decent job. As I said in a previous reply, we have police chiefs and academics doing this for us too

4) good. As you should

5) here we go with this single issue voter bs thrown in. As I said in a previous reply guns represent a lot more than just sports and treating them as ONLY a hobby is why we're in this mess

6) so you almost see my point. Appeasing the government is idiotic and treating guns as something I can casually pick up and put down without a care in the world = nonstop bs. If the community by and large doesn't take itself seriously the govt sure as hell won't

7) yes but sports shooting should not be the ceiling of gun rights otherwise it will be treated as a bullshit hobby, which it's not. People carry guns professionally, to protect themselves out in the middle of nowhere and as a means to protect themselves if things ever get weird

8) correct. I've done it before but it's fair to say that some people will forever remain single celled organisms

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

1) again, changing hearts and minds. Stop thinking the same arguments used to prop us up for the past 50+ years is going to work when it literally didn't. Otherwise we wouldn't have to worry about OICs.

2) again, changing hearts and minds

3) who did you vote for? All of what you mentioned have seen no progress under the current government. That and I don't give a shit about any of that, we're in a gun dedicated subreddit

4) what common ground is there to make? We've been on the backpedal for longer than 90% of us have been alive and there are no good arguments to support any of the bans seen the past several decades

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23 edited Feb 07 '23

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

1) Nothing. I don't own any firearms, haven't touched one and I'm an orphaned Armenian boy stranded in Iraq

2) as I said in my original post, treating sports shooting as the upper limit of gun ownership literally got us to the 2020 OIC, handgun freeze and almost triple fucked us with the semi auto ban. How do you not connect these dots?

3) answer my question. What common ground is there to make if we've been on the back pedal for over 50 years? How many more concessions and compromise needs to be made?

4) who did you vote for?