Enabled by Ignorance: Hunting Rifle Bans and the Perpetual Crisis

Living in a state of perpetual crisis has proven to be an effective means of accomplishing political goals - but only if the people actually believe it.

Governments love a good crisis. Not only is it a wonderful opportunity to swoop in and save defenseless citizens in peril, but it's also a perfect chance to enact sweeping legislation.

Crises also are big money for media since people are easily drawn to the macabre. True crime is always a big seller and anything that proposes the possibility of mass destruction is sure to be a hit.

According to this CBC article the word “crisis” was mentioned 1,747 times in the House of Commons last year. The only year it was mentioned more often than that was the year before, when it was mentioned 1,839 times. Other than during the financial crisis of 2008-09, the average use of “crisis” in the House of Commons seems to be about 405 times per year. Either this is because there are just more crises these days or perhaps it's because it just takes a lot less to qualify something as a crisis today.

Obviously the Covid-19 pandemic could qualify as a crisis, although I would argue that the government response created much more of a crisis than did the actual disease.

Aside from the pandemic, the other apparent crises in this country (according to our politicians) are, in no particular order:

Opioid addiction, inflation, the cost of housing, mental health, labour shortages, the fall of Afghanistan, the state of long-term care, sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces, and of course, climate change.

It's always nice to have choices.

The thing about most of these present day crises is that one must wonder how many of them really would be a crisis if the media and politicians didn't start calling it one in the first place and then keep calling it that for months or years on end.

One thing you may have noticed about many current crises is that the reporting of the alleged crisis is usually filled with predictions and almost always accompanied by words such as, “could”, and “possible”, and “as much as”. This is especially true when talking about the climate “crisis”. It's like when you go into a Walmart and there's a bin that says "UP TO 75% OFF" and then after 20 minutes of digging, the best you can find is 20% off. Technically the sign wasn't inaccurate if the one item that was actually marked 75% off was immediately snapped up by the guy who made the sign.

All of this is not to say these things are unimportant, but just that simply lowering the bar for what constitutes a crisis doesn't automatically make something a crisis. Just like expanding the definition of “racism” doesn't automatically make certain things racist that weren't racist before, or like how declaring something “an emergency” doesn't necessarily make it an emergency, regardless of the applied spin.

And on that note, let me also suggest that expanding the definition of “assault weapons” by putting the word “style” in the middle doesn't make hunting rifles any more dangerous than they used to be.

If you're at all skeptical of my claim about how governments use a crisis, then please allow me to take this opportunity to remind you of the spring of 2020…

When the lockdowns began that spring, I mentioned to my wife that it seemed like the easiest thing in the world to just shut down the entire country and make everyone stay inside. Just like that. And it doesn't matter if you think it was the right move or the wrong one, I'm just saying it was quick and easy, and we all just did what we were told.

All of a sudden there were millions of people sitting in their basements watching Netflix, playing video games, and completely dependent on the government to pay their bills. Ok, it's just for a few weeks, right? Then, about a month in, our PM gets this brainwave that he should just go ahead and give himself sweeping powers to tax and spend however he sees fit without any kind of oversight at all for the next two years because hey, IT'S A CRISIS! Thank God our official opposition didn't let him get away with that one.

Ah, the days when we actually had an official opposition… If that had happened this year, Jagmeet Singh and the NDP would've made sure there was nothing standing in Trudeau's way.

Then, a month after that, we saw how with the stroke of a pen he made thousands of guns owned by law-abiding citizens illegal, literally overnight. He just did it - boom.

It must have been helpful that most of the MPs were on “holidays” because the government had shut down parliament and there was no one there to say "Whoa!" No debate, no input from any of the premiers or any of the opposition parties. Nobody to ask questions or anything, because hey, IT'S A CRISIS!

So, I'm not necessarily saying there was some conspiracy afoot, unless of course you consider political interference in the worse mass shooting in Canadian history (which happened just weeks earlier) to be conspiratorial. I might, because according to the Nova Scotia RCMP, it sounds like that's exactly what happened when RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki attempted to release information (against her officers' wishes) regarding the make and model of the guns used in the shooting. This was presumably in order to get the public onside for the legislation the Liberal government was planning on handing down. Regardless of whether there was nefarious intent, it's pretty obvious someone saw a wonderful opportunity here, and of course that shooting was a part of that opportunity. Are we really to believe that a decision like that just couldn't wait until everyone got back to work? Obviously it couldn't because if they had waited, the opposition wouldn't have allowed it.

A crisis is a wonderful opportunity because everybody's preoccupied. In this case we had a crisis within a crisis. Kinda like a perfect storm if you're looking for ways to get stuff done in politics. The scariest thing about that first gun ban is the knowledge that if they can do that, they can ban literally anything at all, any time they want, for whatever reason they want and no one will have any say in the matter.

None of these things are supposed to happen in this country. This is a good example of the little things that are a big, frickin' deal. Except that it's not a little thing.

Fast-forward to 2022 and now we have Gun Ban - The Sequel. Really just more of the same, except this one apparently plugs some of the holes left by the first one - namely most of the deer rifles that weren't initially affected. Wild game will undoubtedly feel much safer while humans in the inner cities continue to be killed by gangs with smuggled handguns. The other difference this time around is that we really are without an effective opposition, thanks to the Trudeau/Singh coalition, which is arguably almost as good as sending everyone home.

Did you know that 80% of Canadians support a ban on "military, assault style weapons"? Also, do you even know what that means? Of course you don't, because at this point it's just a made up word of which no definition even exists. I'd love to know which guns people bought legally before this ban took effect that are being used by any military, anywhere. It’s convenient that they put the word "style" in there (like they're talking about socks) because now they can pretty much make it mean whatever they want. It's all about how you ask the question. I wonder if 80% of Canadians would support a ban on hunting rifles, because that's what the vast majority of this list is. Of course actual assault weapons have been banned in this country for decades, along with army tanks and anti-aircraft artillery.

It's really laughable until you realize that while you were laughing you just lost another ounce of freedom and some more piece of mind.

When the government (or the media) says that 80% of people are in favour of anything, the very first thing you need to be doing is asking why they're in favour of it.

When reporters go around asking people, "Do you support a ban on military assault-style weapons?" when no definition even exists for that term, and then report that 80% of Canadians support it, it does a few things:

1. It completely bypasses the real issue, which is that certain people are killing certain other people with a certain type of firearm.

2. It exposes the ignorance of people and the media.

3. It influences the opinions of others who are also ignorant, and

4. It exposes an agenda to manipulate said opinions.

The issue here is not that people need or even want to hunt with most of these guns. The real issue is the reason these guns made the list at all. Most of them are no different than the hunting rifles that aren't on the list. Some of the differences appear to be the colour of the stock. Some of them have no discernible difference whatsoever, so how did they decide? And if this is really about keeping people safe, then why exclude any guns from this list? All this, after the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs said openly less than a year earlier that a gun ban would do nothing to change gun crime here, and also that by far the biggest problem is not semi-automatic rifles (which this new legislation targets), but handguns. The fact that this discussion even needs to happen shows just how underhanded this whole thing is.

Now, a word about handguns. Though Justin Trudeau seems to believe he has now somehow “frozen the market for handguns in this country”, the facts (as usual) seem to tell a different story.

As far as firearm incidents go, handguns account for 75% of violent robberies, and 60% of homicides.

When you take into account the fact that 85% of handguns used in crimes came from the United States, what he has actually “frozen” is a whopping 15% of these handguns that are out there being used to rob and murder people.

So if the market for handguns is truly frozen in this country, it would seem that the criminals have yet to get that memo.

But really, the bottom line here for me (and for every other Canadian) is that this isn't strictly about guns. It's much more about the fact that this government thinks they can do whatever they want without any consequences (or much thought), as if no one else knows better than they. In my observation, this has been Justin Trudeau right from the start. Will the condescension and arrogance never end?

Moral of the story:

It's much easier to make a new law than it is to enforce an old one. And here's the twist:

It's also a sure way to boost popularity as long as people are ignorant of the facts.

But here's the other thing:

Ignorance is not stupidity - and there is, in fact a cure for ignorance. This cure is asking questions with an open mind, and in many cases demanding answers. The sooner the majority of people in this country start doing that, the sooner we'll be able to hold these guys to account because we'll no longer be ignorant. And if you willingly choose to remain in ignorance, then I'm sorry, but there is no cure for stupid.