Recurring Canadaguns Politics and Debate Thread

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[u/ealeeyuh]

I hate the gun control debate because those in favor of gun control rarely know anything about firearms, laws, and crime statistics.

All of their arguments, all of them, are easily refutable as well as just being slogans they recite like robots.

Saw an Instagram thread, some guy going on about how outlawing all guns will stop gun crime. Someone responded that 90% of gun crime in Canada is done with illegal firearms. His response was yeah, banning all guns would stop that. How can you have discourse when the response makes 0 sense. They can’t grasp that OUTLAWED firearms are just brought in from the US. Why are we the ones punished by the actions of criminals.

Also, they backup gun control “success” with examples from island countries (UK, Japan, Australia, South Korea technically an island since gun-smuggling from North Korea seems impossible). Gun control CANNOT work simply due to geography, we are next to an open border with the largest firearms market, with corrupt border security if criminals want to bypass the wilderness.

I’ve also seen people compare firearm registration to voting registry, which is just a terrible false equivalency. We register go vote to prevent fraud and to PROVE that you are who you are. Firearms registries don’t do that, we already have licenses, a registry is just a door for the government to micromanage your property and use it to take away your firearms. No point of a registry when criminals wont even register their firearms, so this does NOTHING.

Lastly I’m tired of the doomerism surrounding the idea that Canada doesn’t allow self defence and that it’s illegal. Self defence has always been proportional. The problem is people cite cases where there is obvious negligence on the homeowner. Seriously, if the intruder is RETREATING and you discharge your firearm OUTSIDE your home at them, you are endangering the public at that point, even in the US you would be arrested for this.

[u/FunkyFrunkle → u/ealeeyuh]

People love to drastically over-simplify things without paying any particular attention to nuance and real world realities to put it kindly.

Yes, banning and un-inventing all firearms would stop firearm crime in the same way that all of the water evaporating on earth would stop drownings. Meanwhile, stabbings, beatings and other means of killing people goes on.

Governments and militaries want firearms. So long as there are places that manufacture them, corrupt people will be there to divert some of that to the black market. Guns are also not very complicated objects to make, and to prevent people from making them, you’d have to prohibit everyone from buying building materials. Throw in 3D printing, and the idea of prohibition being an effective policy is pie-in-the-sky fantasy codswallop. Nothing more than pearl-clutching brainrot being repeated by people who were told they were “super smart” for their age a bit too much.

People also conveniently ignore cultural aspects as well. Hunting is still a huge part of Canadian culture, whereas in Japan, Australia and Korea it isn’t.

“You don’t need to hunt to survive anymore!”

You don’t need privacy to survive either. Turns out that this philosophy of having to demonstrate a need for everything versus the greater good is working against us, not for us. Who would have thought that the world’s most annoying argument would eventually go on to fuck everyone over? How the turn tables.

Australia views hunting as a redneck pastime and more in line with pest control than anything else. Only wealthy people in Japan belong to hunting clubs, and I’m not sure about Korea.

Guns are also heavily politicized in Canada whereas in the aforementioned countries, there is a much broader consensus in favour of gun bans. Our government doesn’t even really want to ban the SKS because they can’t without invoking the wrath of First Nations people, and an exemption for First Nations undermines the whole argument that these guns are unsuitable for hunting.

In these other countries, G46 would have been passed into law with no issue. Our government had to withdrawal the list because it caused such an uproar. As the ASFCP rollout has shown us, you need the buy-in for policy to work, and almost the entire country is against it which puts anything resembling a Japanese, Australian or Korean style gun-control regime out of the question. All it would accomplish is driving everything underground as we have no means to enforce a partial ban, let alone a complete one.

Japan is an interesting argument that people use because they completely overlook the fact that civilians have been largely prohibited from owning weapons as far back as the 1500’s, starting with the “great sword hunt”. It’s ingrained into their culture. Japanese commoners were constantly revolting and so Japan disarmed their civilian population with the express purpose to keep the ruling class in place. From that point onward, only Samurai and the elite could own weapons.

It makes me cringe when people cite Japans gun control regime because, to use progressive language, they’re praising something that was put in place to facilitate societal oppression. It wasn’t a public safety initiative or “common sense gun control”, it’s literally a component of the elite controlling the peasants that spanned centuries. Guns were banned the second they were invented for no other reason than to protect the elite. People need to stop cherry-picking and whitewashing shit.

You look at any of the recent news articles about growing PAL numbers and you’ll learn that a lot of the people applying for PALs are people who have immigrated to Canada from countries that did not permit firearms ownership. So clearly, even if you come from a society that frowned upon guns, people still want them so I guess places like Japan aren’t this super-uber awesome mega utopia where everyone hates guns the end.

So yeah, there are many people whose ideas of gun control just suck. Low effort. Big on end-goals with no real idea of how anything currently works, would work or even work out. The extent of people’s knowledge on the subject is the extent of how much they dislike something and how many brain-dead, uninformed opinions they can jam into a comment while their arrogant buddies all give each other self-congratulatory jazz-hands and call it a “mic-drop” moment when really it’s just people who advertise they live a completely sheltered existence and don’t realize the world extends beyond their favourite Starbucks.

[u/Natural_Comparison21 → u/FunkyFrunkle]

Australia funnily enough does have a hunter culture just small. As it currently stands there are about 200,000-640,000 hunters in Australia (the estimates vary greatly.) Or about 0.70%-2% depending on what estimate you use. I will say you are right about Japan and Korea not really having hunting cultures. Funnily enough that’s really come back to bite Japan in the arse (if you know you know.) as they went from just over 530,000 hunters in 1970 to as low as under 200,000. They have however seen a small increase to around the 200,000 range. However even if you were to consider it at its peak Japan had like 0.49% of there population as hunters. Which makes Australia look high.

I agree with the rest of the sentiment as well. The idea of gun control being for public safety is largely a 20th century idea. Apart from pockets of towns durning the 19th century in western America who would ban the carrying of guns in town. Generally speaking gun control or really any weapons control has been about keeping the proles in line.

[u/Goliad1990 → u/Natural_Comparison21]

Australia funnily enough does have a hunter culture just small

Sure, but nothing like ours.

[u/Natural_Comparison21 → u/Goliad1990]

Yea it’s nowhere near to the level of Canadas.