Canada is about to enforce another “assisted suicide” law – the seizure of once lawful firearms. It’s an assisted suicide law because they know you have them, how many, and probably where they are, and if you don’t voluntarily turn them over, the police will be visiting, and that’s likely to result in some hard noes which become yes via death by cop.
The problem began forty-eight years ago, when Canadians failed to stop the government from enshrining its Firearms Acquisition Certificate program (FAC). The FAC mandated registration of handguns and “restricted weapons,” and in the absence of an armed rebellion, led to the 1995 expansion,
… established a national registry of all firearms, including long guns. It also required all gun owners to obtain a Possession and Acquisition License (PAL), replacing the FAC. The Act aimed to enhance public safety by creating a comprehensive system for tracking firearms and ensuring that only qualified individuals could own them.
Law-abiding Canadians didn’t object, allowing the government to know the type and location of every legally owned firearm in the country. Criminals, of course, did not comply, and criminals need not do so now that the Carney Government is following through on a buyback program after banning 2500 “assault-style” firearms in 2020. The operation will work as follows.
The RCMP will notify legal gun owners that they are eligible to participate in a buyback.
Those gun owners need to notify their government through an online portal that they intend to comply. The government term for this is “their intention to participate.”
If accepted (if?), they will be given an appointment at which time local police will arrange to collect the firearms.
At some point, my words, not theirs, those who did not volunteer to “participate” will have the opportunity to have them collected by force.
[T]he police will come to my house at some point, because what’s registered. They know who I am, they know where I live, they know where they are, they’re locked up in my safe, I’m gonna refuse to hand ’em in. They’re gonna come in, rip open my safe, right? Take those firearms and put me in handcuffs.”
Some people will die in the process, so assisted suicide, unless it’s a Canadian Mountie who gets shot dead or a local cop who probably didn’t want to have to do it in the first place. But that then is the issue. Canadians didn’t stop it because their government has no obligation to protect any natural right to self-defense. Not from government at least, and, very likely, given the progressive nature of Canadian politics, anyone else. Criminals have more rights, which means they get to keep their guns because they never licensed or registered them, and the government is giving them a significant force advantage.
This will result in some new shootings that the government will use to come after more guns until not one legal, law-abiding citizen possesses the ability to shoot back at criminals, especially the ones in government.
Thirty years ago, in 1995, Canadians didn’t do enough or did too little to prevent the gun registry, which they must have known would one day be used to collect guns from law-abiding citizens, as the voluntary buyback transitions into forced seizures, and at least a handful of inconvenient but necessary deaths.
I’m not sure if the Alberta Secession movement pivots beyond its economic and energy concerns, but at least a third of the provincial citizenry seems willing to consider independence, and President Trump has announced that the US would recognize a sovereign nation of Alberta.
Does that change if armed resistance to the seizure of firearms owned by previously law-abiding citizens gets ugly?
I can’t predict that, nor can anyone else, but we can watch wide-eyed as every warning we’ve ever given about every progressive intrusion into the right to self-defense plays out in real time just north of the 49th parallel.
