Canada: A Sign of Things to Come

Canada is not the 51st state. While Trump keeps talking about it, I’m sincerely hoping this is just him trolling, because I sure as heck don’t want Canada to have any say in American politics.

The last thing we need is yet another anti-gun state in the nation, especially when I’m still kind of hoping Denmark buys California.

This is the weirdest timeline ever.

Anyway, Canada and guns…

Canada doesn’t acknowledge the right to keep and bear arms. They think it’s a right manufactured here in the United States, not a natural right. Then again, they tried to punish a comedian for a joke, so I’m not sure they actually have a good grasp of rights in the first place.

But they are a microcosm of how gun control works.

Once upon a time, they weren’t all that different from us. They had gun laws, sure, but they had some that were more lax than ours, such as no restriction on short-barreled rifles.

Yet incrementally, more than more happened, and it’s a sign of what is to come here if we let it. 

Mark Chestnut over at The Truth About Guns, offered some thoughts about this recently, which I happen to agree with.

Gun rights organizations have long warned against the incremental nature of gun control.

The theory—indeed, it occurs in practice, too—is that gun-ban advocates will work to pass the most “supportable” bill possible that isn’t, on the surface, devastating to the Second Amendment. The trick is that once they have that law on the books, it’s much easier to amend that law to make it into something more restrictive that never would have had the support to pass in the first place.

Gun bans are an excellent example, and Canada’s banned gun list is the best example of all. In recent days as the Justin Trudeau government comes to an end, Liberals added another 179 makes and models of firearms to the country’s banned “assault-style” firearms list.

According to a report at nationalpost.com, the list of newly prohibited firearms includes dozens of variations of the M1 carbine, a historic semi-automatic rifle that was widely deployed to U.S. soldiers during World War II. The change means that owners of any of the newly prohibited weapons cannot use, sell or loan them, nor can they be bought or imported.

Now, let’s take a look at the M1 carbine for a moment. Yes, it has a detachable magazine but is otherwise no different than any hunting rifle you care to name. This is a gun that many soldiers during World War II weren’t enamored with because it wasn’t powerful enough in their books.

But because it’s a semi-auto with a detachable magazine, it’s now prohibited.

Take a look at the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban for a moment. The M1 carbine was immune from that ban. In fact, it was specifically excluded.

It’s a piece of history, something that collectors and reenactors cherish. It’s not known to have been used in tons of mass shootings, though it did make an appearance at the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966. Since then, though, it’s not really the go-to for mass killers on either side of the US/Canadian border.

For a while, it wasn’t an issue in Canada. Nothing changed to make it an issue, either.

Gun control advocates are surprisingly patient. They’ll take what they can get now, then take more later. It’s why they’re so eager to “compromise” with us, which means just taking a little less than they wanted. They’ll be back in the next legislative cycle to take everything else.

They will take that slow march toward disarmament because they simply don’t mind it as long as they get to the goal eventually.

Unfortunately, on this side of the aisle, we have people who don’t want to go that route. They want it all and they want it now. I get it. I do too.

But we’re never going to get it.

Let’s remember that constitutional carry was never going to happen right out of the gate. Too many people would have freaked out over the idea. They had to warm up to it via concealed carry. Then shall-issue laws meant law-abiding people couldn’t be barred from it, and while some claimed the streets would run red with blood, that didn’t happen, so we could keep going. Now, more than half of the states have some form of permitless carry.

We didn’t lose our rights overnight. We won’t get them back overnight.

Anti-gunners, however, will keep marching on unless we block them. We will never compromise with them again because we’ve seen how they play the game. We will give up nothing at all, especially without something real in return. That’s something they’ll never do.

Canada, however, is a sign of what will come if we’re not very careful and keep up the good fight.