Weekly Politics Thread

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[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/RaHarmakis → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/RaHarmakis]

"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.