Photo credit: Daniel Joseph Petty via Pexels
Earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a sweeping ban and confiscation plan on over 1,500 commonly used firearms. The good news is that Canadian citizens are fighting back. As Fox News reported, a Parliamentary e-petition to reverse the gun ban (petition number “e-2574”) has closed and been certified with 230,905 signatures, making it the most popular petition ever in Canada by over 55,000 signatures.
“We, the undersigned, citizens of Canada, call upon the Prime Minister to immediately scrap his government’s May 1, 2020, Order in Council decision related to confiscating legally owned firearms and instead pass legislation that will target criminals, stop the smuggling of firearms into Canada, go after those who illegally acquire firearms, and apologize to legal firearms owners in Canada,” reads the petition.
Trudeau announced the ban for “public safety” following the actions of a psychopath in Nova Scotia who shot and killed 13 people and then lit fires that killed nine others. The perpetrator of these heinous crimes, it should be noted, illegally acquired all of the firearms he used, including one he took from one of his victims, a police officer.
In addition to the e-petition, Canadians have marched in protest of the Trudeau ban. Recently, an estimated 800 pro-freedom Canadians held a rally in Ottawa against the ban—the event was spearheaded by the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights.
When the Canadian Parliament reconvenes this fall, the e-petition will be put on the Parliamentary docket. According to Canadian law, Parliament must officially respond.
Trudeau’s gun ban requires people to surrender their firearms to the government in return for compensation, although that compensation plan has yet to be unveiled. In the meantime, using or transporting any of the firearms on the list is a crime.
As America’s 1st Freedom reported, when the ban was first announced this past May: “Canadian gun owners will have a two-year ‘amnesty’ period in which they can still possess the many firearms being banned as the Canadian government works out plans to remove the firearms. According to CBC News, Trudeau said gun owners would receive ‘fair compensation’ for the soon-to-be-illegal firearms.”
The banned list includes every AR-style rifle one can imagine, plus AR pistols, various other semi-automatics and some bolt-action hunting rifles, plus actual military ordnance one would assume were already illegal for civilian possession in Canada (and elsewhere), including rocket and grenade launchers, anti-tank rifles and mortars!
Trudeau’s unilateral gun ban is a stark reminder that, in the United States, the constitutional protection afforded by the Second Amendment now prevents a president from effectively using an executive order to take this freedom from us.
As we near November’s election, it is worth noting that the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Joe Biden, has made his anti-Second Amendment stances very clear. On his own election website, Biden calls for a “ban” on semi-automatic firearms that he incorrectly terms “assault weapons,” and says he would have the federal government “buy back” these semi-automatic firearms from their rightful, legal owners.
Biden has also made it clear he would nominate justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who would vote to effectively erase the Second Amendment. We know this because the U.S. Supreme Court’s minority opinions in Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010) clearly told us that, if they had a majority on the court, they’d turn our individual right to keep and bear arms into a collective one that legislators could then ignore. In fact, Biden is even on record as disagreeing with the ruling in Heller, and apparently siding with the minority dissent that rejected the individual right recognized by the majority on the Court.
Without the continued protection of our Second Amendment, bans and confiscation schemes can happen, unchecked. We only need to look north of our border to see an anti-gun, anti-freedom ban in action.
