Owning guns- Right or Privilege?

[u/Low_Bar_804]

So obviously here in Canada our government sees private firearm ownership as a privilege rather than a right. My question is, how you guys feel? Do you think gun ownership is a right or a privilege?

When you look at other things people view as rights, such as abortion, freedom of expression and freedom of religion etc. These are all viewed by most as inherently “good rights”, but in many countries these rights are restricted. I think, along with many others, that it is justified to ignore unjust laws that restrict human rights.

I personally believe that firearm ownership is a fundamental human right because it protects all of our other rights and freedoms from being taken away. So even though legally speaking firearm ownership is a privilege that can be taken away at any time here in Canada, I don’t agree with the way our country and many others treat firearm ownership.

[u/slashcleverusername]

Everything starts out being a right until the government says no. In order to do so, it has to explain the benefits of saying no. Unless it can do that in a convincing way, the law will be struck down by the Courts.

So if your mayor and city council ban listening to nickelback because they don’t like it, they may have good taste but they can’t expect that bylaw to pass muster or survive a court challenge, there’s no good reason for it other than “I don’t like it.”

If they ban playing any music too loud after ten pm, maybe that law will survive. They could make the case that, yes it interferes with your rights to listen to a full-blast outdoor concert whenever you damnwell feel like it, but people need a chance to sleep for health and wellbeing, they have shit to do the next day, and you could go to a concert indoors or even just listen to a recording on your headphones if you’re that desperate for loud music at 3 am.

The point is they have to make the case, and they need a reason that is as important as the rights they’re meddling with, and they need to be able to explain it clearly to the courts.

And our Charter of Rights is pretty stern about this stuff: it lists a whole bunch of examples of things that are specifically protected. But it adds a bit that laws can only limit our rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

So the test our government faces actually goes beyond our borders. If there is a free country somewhere in the world who has figured out how to do something important, but in a less-meddlesome way, the government can find its laws falling due to the example set by other countries. Our Supreme Court is not required to stick to Canadian law for precedents or examples like this. Court decisions in Australia or the UK are definitely not binding on Canada. But our Courts are free to look at those and say “Yeah they made a good point” and adopt similar reasoning in similar cases here.

The particular rights here are probably from the Constitution Act, 1867. We all have a constitutional right to “peace, order, and good government.”

So we can start out assuming we have the right to gun ownership (it doesn’t matter if it’s listed or not since the government would need a reason to block it anyway). But we also obviously have a right to peace and order, it’s right in the text. So if someone else’s gun is the cause of disorder and disrupting the peace, the rest of us have our own right to have the government stop that person from owning a gun.

It is up to the government to prove they’re doing that in the most reasonable and least meddlesome way possible. Which means maybe they can’t ban ownership. Maybe they can only require training and screening. Again, the standard they face is “What is so important that you’re trying to achieve it at the expense of some Canadians doing what they want?” And then “Prove to us this is the least meddlesome way possible.”

And I don’t think our current gun laws have been fully tested in that way, so probably all or part of them will fall with the right court challenges.