When I was in the Navy, as most people who served can attest, there were times when someone higher up the food chain needed volunteers for something, and you were told that you’d volunteered. As Navy stands for Never Again Volunteer Yourself, this happened to us fairly regularly. The term we used for this was “voluntold.”
That’s what went through my head when I came across a piece talking about how the Canadian “buyback” of certain semi-automatic rifles, by which I mean most semi-automatic rifles, is framed as voluntary when it’s no such thing.
I mean, when it comes with prison time, how voluntary can it be?
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians could face prison time if they do not turn in their newly prohibited guns under a supposedly “voluntary” gun buyback program that is testing the strength of Canada’s bureaucratic regime.
Since May 2020, the Canadian government has attempted to institute a massive “assault-style firearms compensation program” that will purportedly trade cash for prohibited guns. If Canadians do not turn in a prohibited gun by October 2026, they could face up to five years in prison. The program has faced massive pushback from provincial leaders and gun rights organizations who say it will only disarm law-abiding Canadians.
“We’re finding that they’re running into a lot of compliance issues,” Blair Hagen, an executive at Canada’s National Firearms Association, told The Daily Wire. “They have no idea where [the guns are] or who has them. So it’s proving to be a very, very difficult situation for the government.”
Due to the scope of the program, the government has extended amnesty three times for ownership of one of the thousands of banned so-called “assault-style” guns, with the latest one set to expire in October 2026.
An order in council rolled out by then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in May 2020 banned thousands of “assault weapons” and claimed to offer compensation to those who voluntarily turn in their weapons. According to Hagen, an order in council is a “non-democratic legal instrument” where the Canadian government can ban items like guns “without having to take legislation through parliament.”
Today, the government describes participation in the gun buyback program as “voluntary” but that compliance with the gun ban is required.
“While participating in the program is voluntary, compliance with the law is not. Businesses and individual firearm owners must safely dispose of or permanently deactivate their assault-style firearms before the amnesty period ends on October 30, 2026, or risk criminal liability for the illegal possession of a prohibited firearm,” the government says on its website.
So it’s completely voluntary, until it’s not.
OK, in fairness, the buyback is sort of voluntary. You can destroy your firearms or something and comply with the law without taking part in the buyback, but it still feels vile to call it voluntary when it’s really just the least terrible bite of a crap sandwich, at best.
It reminds me of all those people who lost their jobs because they refused to take the “voluntary” COVID vaccine, including numerous members of our military and first responder community. It was so voluntary that they were punished for taking that word literally.
This is on a similar vein, really. You could refuse to take part in the buyback, but you’re going to get screwed completely if you don’t, which still isn’t much of a voluntary thing.
Then again, Canada has never viewed guns as a right. They’ve had officials outright say as much, which means they figure they can screw gun owners over as much as they want, which they’re doing.
But what starts in one place rarely stays there.
Sooner or later, someone will try to voluntell us to hand over our so-called assault weapons, that we should be grateful for what we’re permitted to have, that the Second Amendment doesn’t matter, and all that is important is the all-mighty state.
And if that person has the power to make it stick, well, they’ll see voluntary action just fine. It won’t be the voluntary actions they were hoping for, though.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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