Earlier this month, demonstrators gathered on the lawn of the Myles F. Burke Police Headquarters in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to protest the federal government’s new gun buyback program. 250 strong and adorned in an assortment of flannel, sunglasses, and baseball caps, the rally-goers held bold text protest signs with references to the Bible and “wasted tax dollars.” Guest speakers, including local Conservative MPs, bemoaned government overreach and encroachment on “good gun-abiding people.” And they made a fair point.
If one considers the merits of the Government of Canada’s gun buyback, broad design flaws quickly become apparent, namely its cost and failure to target illegal firearm owners, the main perpetrators of gun violence in Canada. Although it is easy to criticize the ill-targeted excesses of Liberal gun policy, backlash from gun-owning communities and Conservative politicians ultimately fails to address the merits of the gun buyback program itself in the context of the country’s relatively low rates of gun ownership.
In May 2020, weeks after a mass shooting in Nova Scotia that killed 22 people, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on over 1,500 models of ‘assault-style’ fire-arms, and instated a transition period during which the government would undertake a national gun-buyback program and shield owners of prohibited firearms from criminal liability.
Most available statistics indicate that gun crimes in Canada primarily occur through black market weapons smuggled into the country from the United States. No clear correlation between legal gun purchases and crime has been established; in fact, firearms licence-holders have a 10 per cent lower murder rate compared to the Canadian average. Even the Nova Scotia mass shooter who prompted the gun ban used smuggled American guns.
The program’s compensation of gun owners alone will cost an estimated total of $756 million CAD, leaving some critics to wonder if those funds could be allocated towards something more useful. Others claim the specific gun models listed within the ban itself are somewhat arbitrary, with similar guns to those banned still available for purchase.
Essentially, the government is targeting law-abiding Canadians who purchased their weapons legally at great expense to the Canadian tax payer, for virtually zero benefit.
Any Conservative politician worth their salt will bang their chest in solidarity with gun-owners. It is easy to see why. Reckless spending in order to create a pointless bureaucracy designed to oppress individual rights, plagued by administrative incompetence and arbitrary decision making? It’s practically a slam-dunk. The Liberal gun buyback regime is, as much as it may hurt for some to admit, stupid.
But who cares? If one told the average Canadian that the federal government was spending a miniscule fraction of our federal budget to remove about 100,000 ‘assault-style’ weapons from the hands of the public, would they be upset? The vast majority of Canadians—92.9 per cent—do not possess firearms, and the cultural inertia that underpins firearm rights in the US does not exist here. On the contrary, most Canadians, while they may not grasp the minutia of the issue, support increased firearm restrictions.
Self-defense law in Canada does not allow for the use of firearms in the protection of one’s property, rendering guns almost exclusively used for target-shooting and hunting. In other words, gun ownership in Canada is just another equipment-centric outdoor hobby, like kayaking or dirt-biking. What is the difference between guns and hypothetical onerous over-regulation of, say, jet-skis? If certain models of jet-skis suddenly faced sweeping government bans—with proportionate compensation for jet-ski owners, mind you, would anybody shed a tear? The major difference being, of course, that jet-skis cannot be used to conduct a mass shooting.
Gun advocates have a point in criticizing this specific program, but this argument is senseless in the context of Canada’s political and cultural understanding of gun ownership. There was no counterprotest to the gathering outside the police station in Cape Breton. Besides gun-owners and those that stood to gain politically from their outrage, nobody showed up. I’m not even sure if the police looked out the window.
