CANADA JOINS BRITISH COMMONWEALTH NATIONS, AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND, IN BANNING “ASSAULT WEAPONS”

TRUDEAU ACTS, APPARENTLY UNILATERALLY, AND WITH SPEED, TO BAN “ASSAULT WEAPONS” IN CANADA

On April 30, 2020, the Hill reported that:

“Canada’s government is set to announce a ban on assault-style weapons following a deadly shooting in Nova Scotia this month that killed 22 people.

Officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration will announce the ban before the week’s end, though the key provisions have already been decided by his Cabinet.

Among the weapons set to be banned include the AR-15 and the Ruger Mini-14. It wasn’t initially clear whether Canadian citizens who currently own such weapons will be required to turn them in.

After a deadly shooting in New Zealand, officials banned assault-style weapons and instituted a buyback program.

Trudeau’s Liberal Party pledged to enact an assault-style weapons ban in last year’s election campaign, at the time pledging to implement a similar buyback program. 

The move comes after a gunman killed 22 people, including a police officer, during a rampage through the rural province of Nova Scotia while driving a car meant to look like a Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser. The suspected gunman, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman, was killed by police.”

At a news conference on that same day, global news reports, that,

“Trudeau was asked during a briefing with journalists in Ottawa on Thursday about a report published by the Globe and Mail newspaper that said the government plans to issue a new list of banned high-power firearms including the notorious AR-15 weapon used in recent mass shootings in the U.S.

‘We have made a firm commitment to Canadians to ban military assault-style weapons because, in Canada, there’s no room for weapons made to kill large numbers of people,’ Trudeau said.

‘We were almost ready to announce measures to strengthen gun control when Parliament was suspended because of the pandemic and we will be making announcements in days to come and will give more details on this then.’

Trudeau made good on his word. On May 1, one day later, the BBC reported Trudeau’s announcement to the world:

“Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has introduced a long-promised ban on assault-style weapons following the country’s worst gun massacre in April.

New rules would make it illegal to sell, transport, import or use 1,500 varieties of assault weapons.

The ban is effective immediately but there will be a two-year amnesty period for law-abiding gun owners to comply.

Mr Trudeau also said he would introduce legislation, which has yet to pass, to offer a buy-back programme.

Unlike the US, gun ownership is not enshrined in Canada’s constitution, but gun ownership is still popular, especially in rural parts of the country.

Mr Trudeau made a point of saying that most gun owners are law-abiding citizens, but argued that assault-weapons serve no beneficial purpose.

‘These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only — only to kill the largest amount of people in the shortest amount of time,’ he said in a press conference on Friday.

‘You don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer.’

The call to ban assault weapons was heightened after a number of high-profile shootings—in 2017, at a mosque in Quebec, in 2018 on a commercial street in Toronto and most recently, in a rampage across the province of Nova Scotia that became the deadliest shooting in Canada’s history.

RCMP have said that the shooter was not licensed to own firearms, but had what appeared to be an assault-style weapon, as well as other guns. The RCMP did not specify which kind, so it is unknown if it will be covered by the ban.

Mr Trudeau campaigned on the ban ahead of last November’s election, and he said he was planning on introducing the ban in March, but it was delayed because of coronavirus.

His government had already expanded background check requirements and made it tougher to transport handguns, prior to November’s election.

So that there is no mistake as to when the ban on “assault weapons,” takes place in Canada, The National Review announced, on May 1, 2020, that, as Trudeau makes clear, Canada’s firearms’ ban takes effect immediately.

“ ‘Effective immediately, it is no longer permitted to buy, sell, transport, import or use military-grade assault weapons in this country,’ Trudeau said at a press conference. Trudeau added that Canada was effectively ‘closing the market’ on certain firearms and categorized several mass shootings that have occurred in Canada as a ‘stain our conscience.’”

The ban will classify various firearms that have been used in mass shootings in Canada and around the world as ‘prohibited,’ including the AR-15 rifle, M14 semi-automatic rifle, Ruger Mini-14, and others.

‘From this moment forward, the number of these guns will only decrease in Canada,’ Public Safety minister Bill Blair said at the briefing alongside Trudeau. Blair emphasized that the ‘vast majority’ of Canadian gun owners are law-abiding and use their firearms safely.

Canada’s government will implement a buyback program for current legal owners of one or more of the 1,500 types of firearms covered by the ban. Owners will be granted a two-year amnesty during which time they must participate in the buyback program.”

Recall how Australia, back in 1996 also used a “mass shooting” as a pretext to ban semiautomatic firearms. Twenty-two years later in the U.S., Fortune Magazine expressed exuberance over Australia’s actions,

“So what happened after the assault-weapon ban? Well therein lies the other half of the story twist noted above: Nothing.

Nothing, that is, in a good way.

Australian independence didn’t end. Tyranny didn’t come. Australians still hunted and explored and big-wave surfed to their hearts’ content. Their economy didn’t crash; Invaders never arrived. Violence, in many forms, went down across the country, not up. Somehow, lawmakers on either side of the gun debate managed to get along and legislate.

As for mass killings, there were no more. Not one in the past 22 years.”

Actually, there were never many firearm homicide deaths in Australia, anyway. And, contrary to the Fortune writer’s supposition about tyranny having failed to materialize in Australia, tyranny is always just around the corner, up around the bend, where a person’s right to keep and bear arms remains a government prerogative rather than a God-given right. In fact, one may well argue that the Australian Government’s draconian actions point to the very presence of tyranny in that Country and in others where Government severely restricts or suppresses altogether the individual’s right to keep and bear arms. 

On March 21, 2019, as reported in the weblog, the Conversation,

“New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has just announced a ban in that country on specific military-style firearms. It will soon become an offence to own or possess semi-automatic firearms and shotguns with detachable magazines capable of firing more than five cartridges.”

“A rigorous study to ascertain ‘. . . the null hypothesis that the rate of mass shootings in Australia remained unchanged after introduction of the National Firearms Agreement’” was reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, on July 3, 2018.

The bottom line: no causal connection can be established. The report states,

“ ‘Without a 22-year randomized controlled trial assigning only parts of a national population to live under the National Firearms Agreement, establishing a definitive causal connection between this legislation and the 22-year absence of mass firearm homicides is not possible.’ At most ‘a standard rare events model provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that this prolonged absence simply reflects a continuation of a preexisting pattern of rare events.’”

Strong evidence of a causal connection, though, is not definitive evidence, sufficient to establish a causal connection” between enactment of a strict “assault weapons” ban and a reduction in the incidence of “mass shootings.”

But, there is a more important point to be made here. The test reported in Annals of Internal Medicine applied the null hypothesis, as they state, only to “mass shooting” incidents, not all shooting incidents, and that limitation already limits and skews the results the null hypothesis at the outset.

In that regard the website fee.org reported:

“In the wake of the March 15 New Zealand shootings, advocates for new gun restrictions in New Zealand have pointed to Australia as ‘proof’ that if national governments adopt gun restrictions like those of Australia’s National Firearms Agreement, then homicides will go into steep decline.

‘Exhibit A’ is usually the fact that homicides have decreased in Australia since 1996 when the new legislation was adopted in Australia.

There are at least two problems with these claims. First, homicide rates have been in decline throughout western Europe, Canada, and the United States since the early 1990s. The fact that the same trend was followed in Australia is hardly evidence of a revolutionary achievement. Second, homicides were already so unusual in Australia, even before the 1996 legislation, that few lessons can be learned from slight movements either up or down in homicide rates.”

THE TAKEAWAY FROM ALL THIS:

If you would like to live in a Commonwealth Nation, as the subject of the Queen of England, have at it. The Government will take good care of you:

Security proffered by Government = Tyranny

Unlike the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the right of the people to keep and bear arms IS enshrined in the United States. Americans consider that a blessing—a fundamental, unalienable, immutable right bestowed on man by the Divine Creator, that no man or government can lawfully deny any man.

Let both the Queen of England and her subjects in the Commonwealth Nations and the atheist Marxists and Anarchists in our own Nation scoff at our God-given right, as a free sovereign people, to keep and bear arms.

We will never allow our Nation to be overrun with the ugly weeds of tyranny.

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Copyright © 2020 Roger J Katz (Towne Criour), Stephen L. D’Andrilli (Publius) All Rights Reserved.