r/canadaguns 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/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.