r/canadaguns • u/Hotdog_Broth • Mar 21 '26

News / Politics / Activism Waterloo Regional Police Service to Participate in Federal Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program | Waterloo Regional Police

https://wrps.ca/news/waterloo-regional-police-service-participate-federal-assault-style-firearms-compensation
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190

u/Cre_AK47 Name Prohibited by OIC Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

I love how the Waterloo police chief can't read the room... 95% of police agencies say F that, but Waterloo looks at the number of agencies that refused, and then they say, "You know what, we're going to help with stealing guns from legal owners."

Huge L ...

98

u/Hotdog_Broth Mar 21 '26

Reinforces the opinion I’ve had for many years that the WRPS is the single most pathetic police force in the country

35

u/Bitter_Lettuce2970 Mar 21 '26

HRP has entered the chat.

17

u/i-Hermit Mar 21 '26

Yeah.. though it's likely little surprise, given that our city council are mostly a bunch of woke idiots and our mayor is a liberal idiot who's failed up his entire life.

3

u/Hotdog_Broth Mar 21 '26

Lol they’re a close second in my mind

12

u/Darthwilhelm on Mar 21 '26

Where do you think most of the budget went? Its not going to gun owners lmao.

8

u/Lumindan Mar 21 '26

Dude saw a quick pay day and jumped on it.

How absolutely shameful.

1

u/gspotcowboy Mar 21 '26

They have to pay for those sniper overtime hours somehow. Who else is going to protect the children participating in the Easter egg hunt??

-5

u/androstaxys Mar 21 '26

Honestly…. It’s actually insane the police have the option to enforce/or not the law.

This decision shouldn’t be the coming from a police chief.

If they ignore/enforce this, what else are they executing this kind of legislative power over??

3

u/TMS-Mandragola al Mar 21 '26

You must be very young.

Police (at least in the western tradition) have long had discretion over what to pursue -or not pursue.

Being drunk and disorderly in public is illegal in most places. Do they camp outside of bars after legislated closing and arrest everyone they find relieving themselves in an alley?

If that person is doing so after picking fights with everyone on their walk to wherever, then yeah, probably. If that person simply had a weak bladder and is making a discrete stop while quietly going on their way home and not causing further trouble, probably not.

The former is being a clear nuisance. The latter similarly likely not on the right side of the law, but the harms being done to society are not equal. An arrest, even without charge, might make a lasting impact on someone's employability, their future prospects. On the balance, is it worth it to throw the book at either person? For the former, perhaps. For the latter, it's likely that on the balance they'd allow that person to go home without invervention - is the benefit to society higher from punishing someone for a lapse in judgement so small outweighed by the societal harm done by interveneing, that person being jailed, losing their job, perhaps impacting their family structure?

Wide discretion in enforcement is how you balance the costs (direct and indirect, societal and individual) against the benefit. It's also how you get a drunken, drug addict mayor flying under the radar for years - discretion being applied incorrectly is as bad for society as it being applied correctly.

Personally, i'd rather some discretion in the hands of police than every small infraction being met with the full weight of the law. Judge Dredd isn't a vision of the future I find appealing, nor do I want to see a future in which the line between lethal and illegal so sharp it's trivial to cross inadvertently.

The confiscation program is simply discretion writ large. Most rational police services (and premiers) understand there is no threat to society from civilian ownership of firearms, particularly under a well run regulatory framework. They are keeping their scarce resources pointed at criminality, as they should, by declining.

The only people inclined to participate are doing so because of the cynical political arithmetic of optics in urban Quebec, the GTA and parts of BC, or are motivated by ideology because they hate freedom, personal responsibility and are so blinded by their beliefs that they are dispensing with thousands of years of knowledge and evidence in favour of a well armed and proficient civilian population by literally choosing to ignore the facts.

Also, discretionary power and legislative power are fundamentally different things. The fact that some Canadians don't understand the difference between these words is in large part why we've slipped into this mess. We've become a country far too stupid for our own good.

1

u/IGnuGnat Mar 22 '26

They always have to pick their battles. They used to ignore a lot of mj smokers because there were more important things to focus on.