My gun enthusiast friends are excited by “Canada bans assault-style weapons after its worst ever mass murder” (CNN):
“You don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa. “So, effective immediately, it is no longer permitted to buy, sell, transport, import or use military-grade assault weapons in this country.”
“These weapons were designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. There is no use and no place for such weapons in Canada,” Trudeau said.
Commonsense gun control, certainly. Canadians don’t want anyone to be shot and killed, so the weapons will be melted down and turned into shovels to dig up oil sands that can be turned into crude oil (after emitting tons of CO2 for processing), right? Maybe not:
The ban is effective immediately but disposal of the weapons will be subject to a two-year amnesty period. Trudeau said some form of compensation would also be put in place but the firearms can also be exported and sold after a proper export license is obtained.
So there is “no use and no place for such weapons in Canada”, but maybe, in Justin Trudeau’s opinion, people in Detroit need them for blasting coronavirus out of the air?
[Update, inspired by a comment below: Human life is priceless, which is why we need to shut down our economy for 50 years, if necessary, to prevent even one needless death from Covid-19. Assault rifles are dangerous and put human life, which is priceless, at risk. Why wait two years to collect them? Shouldn’t the weapons be collected no later than Monday at 5 pm?]
I’m surprised they did the two year amnesty and the export license disposal route instead of telling people to just turn them in within 30 days and pay them the fair market value of the gun (which can be relatively easily established). If it’s a pressing concern, and an emergency, what good is letting people keep them for two more years? They know where all of them are and who owns them. I take it from this that the Canadian government doesn’t want to pay anything for them.
Alex: That is a great point that I missed. Human life is priceless, which is why we need to shut down our economy for 50 years, if necessary, to prevent even one needless death from Covid-19. Assault rifles are dangerous and put human life, which is priceless, at risk. Shouldn’t the weapons be collected no later than Monday at 5 pm?
The only other reason to do it this way would be to ensnare as many owners as possible who try to use their legally-acquired guns over the next two years, because even firing them is now illegal. So anyone who takes their gun out for a last trip to the range, hunting, etc. before sending it away can be rounded up.
Here’s the full list:
http://canadagazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2020/2020-05-01-x3/html/sor-dors96-eng.html
By the way, Canada is doing this to their law-abiding gun owners even though the Nova Scotia shooter had his weapons in Canada illegally.
This order would not have stopped him (he bought them in the US and brought them illegally to Canada!) That’s par for the course. Common sense.
“Human life is priceless -”
Are you confusing Canada with some other country? In Canada, the principle of efficiency and the use of cost-benefit analysis are widely accepted. An example: https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2009/11/too-much-health-care/
Our disagreement over COVID-19 is that you believe the economic costs of the social distancing measures needed to get R0 below 1 outweigh the benefits. In Canada, this is a fringe position.
Matthew Yglesias describes the logic:
Paul Wells, describing the CDC’s pandemic planning back in 2007:
By the way, here’s some data you may be interested in looking at. From the Economist: Would most COVID-19 victims have died soon, without the virus?
Russil: I don’t understand the cost-benefit analysis with picking up assault rifles on Monday versus letting Canadians continue to possess these dangerous weapons for two additional years. What is the purported “benefit” to allowing citizens to keep guns? We know that the cost might be another shooting. If the Canadian government has the power to confiscate these, isn’t it obviously better to confiscate them right now?
The benefit is that all the man-children who can’t stand the thought of living without their precious safety blankets and pacifiers, will have a couple years to untwist their undies over having to part with their guns.
@Philg: The most plausible answer is that Trudeau knows there isn’t really an emergency, that the thousands of legal AR-15 owners in Canada do not pose any immediate or emerging threat, and that life doesn’t really have infinite value. It was politically expedient for him to slam the ban down as fast he could, before the full investigation into the shooting could be concluded.
Since when do examples that Canada sets inspire us? Nothing to worry about for US AR-15 owners. We will embrace Canadian style gun control when we enact Canadian commie health care.
LinePilot: Certainly we would not want to emulate Canada’s immigration system, which discourages low-skill migrants in favor of young skilled educated fluent-in-English-or-French workers! https://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/crs-tool.asp
There are also refugees, of course, as well as their extended families.
For example:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/marcus-askar-150-somali-family-1.4394375
It should also be noted that Trudeau did this without the approval or consultation of Parliament, thus sparing everyone there from the horror of having to cast a vote on tackling the grave emergency threatening all of Canada that was exposed by one murderous lunatic dressed up as an RCMP officer. No debate, no Parliamentary procedure, no votes.
Like New Zealanders, Aussies, and numerous other countries, Canadians are reasonable, rational people who’s identities don’t revolve around a culture of starting and losing wars, and silly guns. Therefore, there is probably wide public support for the move and the technicalities will work themselves out; the leader of the country lead.
@Senorpablo: I’m surprised you didn’t link to Rebecca Peters’ paper. She has a fundamentally different view of people’s right to keep and bear arms, to say the least, and George Soros’ organization agrees with her wholeheartedly.
http://www.australianreview.net/journal/v1/n2/peters_browne.pdf
You can’t copy and paste excerpts from it because it was password protected to prevent that, but it explains her views on the public health philosophy of gun control very clearly. In the name of prevention and public health, people lose their rights, they cannot own guns for self defense, the antiquated notions of presumption of “innocence” until proven “guilty” are discarded, the laws must prevent physical harm to victims “whether innocent or not” and in her words:
“The great breakthrough in gun control in the last decade of the 20th century was the recognition that punishing crimes against the innocent by officially designated wrongdoers [the “guilty”] was an inadequate policy stance.”
Because good people sometimes do bad things, the public health philosophy requires that everyone be preemptively restricted from possessing the means to do bad things, whether or not they’ve done anything illegal. “Assault weapons” in Canada are already heavily restricted, but according to Trudeau, their possession must be entirely eliminated to make people safer, despite the fact that it was the failure of his own police (or anyone else who might have defended themselves) to stop this man.
What Trudeau did was squarely in line with the public health model. In response to the actions of a murderer, he took the opportunity to prohibit thousands of people who had nothing to do with the crime from owning their legally obtained weapons. In two years, they will be the criminals. He punished the innocent after the guilty party was dead. Since the public health model regards the distinction between innocence and guilt as irrelevant, it makes perfect sense to him. There are no “good guys” and “bad guys.” Nothing in his ban would have prevented Wortman from killing 22 people. It certainly wouldn’t have stopped him from burning 9 of those people to death. Perhaps if the RCMP hadn’t let him drive around in a replica police cruiser overnight without issuing an alert, he might have been stopped a lot sooner, but we’ll never know.
Needless to say, I disagree with her views, and I strenuously disagree with Trudeau’s actions against thousands of people who did nothing wrong. Do you think the next step should be for Trudeau to issue an edict banning handguns? Wortman had a couple of those, too. He took one from an RCMP officer after killing her. He didn’t care about the distinction between “innocent” and “guilty” either.
Alex, this is another example of the lengthy mental gymnastics gun lovers will goto in order to justify their insecurities. And yet, there is an exhaustive list of countries and societies that contradict these thoughts, including our own America not long ago when assault riffles were illegal and the sky didn’t fall. Most non paranoid people understand that they can live a normal life without assault rifles, and that they have zero meaningful positive contribution to society. They also understand that you can never get rid of something entirely, but in time you can make a worthwhile difference if you start somewhere.
SenorPablo-
What worthwhile difference would this reactionary assault-weapons ban that Trudeau passed have made in this case if it had already been law at the time of the crime?
This isn’t checkers. It’s not meant to be a short term miracle; a ban on guns gains effectiveness over time. More like chess.
@Senorpablo: How very totalitarian of you. The fact that you want them taken away shows you understand how valuable they really are.
Also, one other thing Trudeau didn’t shed more any light on: the more than three hour elapsed time it took the RCMP to issue an alert describing the gunman / arsonist. He shot 13 people and burned 9 to death. Canada is not going to ban incendiary materials, even though Wortman used those illegally, too.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/29/americas/nova-scotia-shooting-investigation/index.html
“Police have said that they learned about the gunman’s clothing and vehicle from a witness between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Sunday.
The formal process for issuing an alert was started, but it took several hours to make its way up the chain of command, police said. Nearly three hours later, an alert had still not been issued.”
So there’s this maniac impersonating an RCMP officer, driving in a replica RCMP vehicle, shooting and burning people to death, and it takes 3+ hours to issue an alert. And the first official response, before the investigation is concluded, is to take people’s legally-owned guns.
You don’t have to be an “early responder” to be a “first responder”!
“Alex: That is a great point that I missed. Human life is priceless, which is why we need to shut down our economy for 50 years, if necessary, to prevent even one needless death from Covid-19.”
The economy needs to be shut down until after the November election. No Democrat, except for unionized teachers who would get full pay to have a longer summer vacation, would want the shut down if Biden wins.
Fun fact: an AR-15 couldn’t kill a deer, and is much less lethal than a typical hunting rifle. Military rifles are designed to wound opponents, not kill them. Treating a wounded opponent slows down troops much more than a dead one.
You and I have a different definition of “fact”.
https://youtu.be/aSpPWPmKlAQ
I’m not saying that’s what I would have shot that deer with, I’m saying that deer is dead.
“Military rifles are designed to wound opponents, not kill them.”
You, Sir, should teach this new paradigm at West Point!
Twenty years ago that was true, but not now. They’re used for hunting deer and other game all the time now, but you have to pick the right ammunition, bullet type and caliber for the job, and it depends on the range you intend to shoot, but there are plenty of cartridges available now. But you’re right about one thing: the AR-15 isn’t an overpowering gun in terms of muzzle energy with the plain-vanilla 55 grain NATO bullet. If you are going to ban guns based on lethality, there are a lot more powerful weapons. The people who want to ban them know that. First the ARs, then everything else.
https://www.realtree.com/brow-tines-and-backstrap/why-you-should-use-an-ar-15-as-a-deer-rifle
“According to a recent study by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, 27 percent of hunters surveyed have used a modern sporting rifle (MSR) in pursuit of game. Of those, 48 percent report having used a MSR within the past five years, illustrating a growth in the use of the platform among those hunters surveyed. Of those answering yes to the use of an MSR for hunting, nearly 60 percent state they have used that platform to hunt large game.”
They’re popular for other game, also:
https://time.com/4390506/gun-control-ar-15-semiautomatic-rifles/
Canada didn’t just ban AR-15s. They also banned AR-10s, which are similar, but larger caliber. Get yourself a Savage MSR-10 Hunter in .308. Just not if you live in Canada.
https://www.savagearms.com/content?p=firearms&a=product_summary&s=22993
Didn’t a great man say something like “I don’t know what weapons WW3 will be fough with, but Canada will fight it with sticks and stones.”
@Tom: Huh. I thought the Great Toucan Sam said: “Obama says if you like your AR-15s, you can keep your AR-15s.” 😛
> Canada’s immigration system, which discourages low-skill migrants
Lol. Canadastan doesn’t apply “skills-based merit testing” to all the children + elderly parents + siblings + relatives that are generously allowed under the guise of “family reunification”. I’ve read as few as 20% come in on actual merit.
“Lol. Canadastan doesn’t apply “skills-based merit testing” ”
According to my Canada based sources, merit-based immigration is the thing of the past with Trudeau and his acolytes calling the shots.
Ivan: I must take issue with the suggestion that migrants who come to collect welfare have less “merit” than migrants who come to work! Canadians must get a lot of psychological value from handing out several generations of welfare to migrants. If this did not make Canadians feel good about themselves, they wouldn’t keep doing it, right? So the migrant who collects welfare contributes just as much to Canadian society as the migrant who starts a business or works for wages. Canadians are happy to pay both of these migrants, one via welfare and one via wages. So both must have “merit”.
Philip: LOL no. Welfare is an insurance program, intended to support people who can’t work (e.g. those who are disabled). Canadians are very rules-oriented – we’re like Switzerland to the US’s Germany.
My favorite example of the propagation of Canadian norms, from a 2017 story about Syrian refugees resettled in Canada. (There’s a common program here where a group of five private sponsors will support a refugee family, helping them to settle and integrate and providing some financial support.)
Russil: I think that you’re using the term “welfare” in the same way that advocates for more government hand-outs here in the U.S. use it. A person who gets a taxpayer-funded apartment (means-tested public housing), taxpayer-funded healthcare (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (food stamps/SNAP/EBT), and taxpayer-funded Smartphone (Lifeline/Obamaphone) for a 100-year period is not “on welfare” because none of these benefits are cash.
In 2018, there were 186,000 economic immigrants to Canada (about 60% of all admissions), 85,000 immigrants in the family class, and 50,000 refugees resettled in Canada. Source: 2019 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration.
Perhaps, my sources exaggerate the immigration situation direness in Canada.
However, using your liberal approach to fraction handling, in 2010 skilled immigration constituted 70% of the total and in 2018 it fell to 60% at the expense of admitting more refugees. The same distribution is projected for 2019 (with no real numbers available yet, why not?).
So, there’s some grounds to worry that the merit based immigration fraction may be diluted even more in future given the proclivities of your current government.
“Perhaps my sources exaggerate the immigration situation direness in Canada.”
Perhaps. A 2008 paper noted that economic immigration had been stable at around 60% of total immigration for several years. Not sure why it was as high as 70% in 2010. Immigration and Integration in Canada.
Canada seems to be doing remarkably well at integrating newcomers. Canadian exceptionalism.
Russil: Certainly immigrants seem to be well-integrated into the Canadian welfare system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_immigration_to_Canada says “In previous decades, immigrant income levels did rise to the national average after 10 years, but in recent years the situation has deteriorated. A 2003 study published by Statistics Canada noted that “in 1980 recent immigrants had low-income rates 1.4 times that of Canadian born, by 2000 they were 2.5 times higher, at 35.8%”
If the goal was to create a huge class of people who would be forever dependent on public housing and other forms of welfare, Canada has succeeded admirably!
Russil: “Chronic Low Income Among Immigrants in Canada and its Communities” (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2017397-eng.htm ) says “There were large differences in the chronic low-income rate by immigrant place of birth, even after adjusting for differences in other immigrant background characteristics.” In other words, Canadians have managed to find countries from which immigrants can be gathered up and swaddled in multiple lifetimes of welfare and this makes Canadians feel so good about themselves they keep going back to these countries to get more!
Philip: In Canada, being “low-income” doesn’t make you eligible for welfare! I’d suggest that a more relevant measurement is the employment rate. In 2019, the unemployment rate for immigrants was 5.9%; for the population as a whole, it was 5.7%. The stereotype here is that immigrants are willing to work hard at low-paying jobs.
What I wrote above: I think that you’re using the term “welfare” in the same way that advocates for more government hand-outs here in the U.S. use it. A person who gets a taxpayer-funded apartment (means-tested public housing), taxpayer-funded healthcare (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (food stamps/SNAP/EBT), and taxpayer-funded Smartphone (Lifeline/Obamaphone) for a 100-year period is not “on welfare” because none of these benefits are cash.
A standard American welfare “family” is a “single mom” with two children. Suppose that such a family is living in Toronto and the mom does not work. Assume that the children were the result of sex acts with two different men, neither of whom has any income and therefore who cannot be tapped for child support. So the family is not only “low-income” but “no-income.” You say that they’re not eligible for “welfare”. Does that mean that, absent a voluntary act of charity from a private citizen, they will be living in a tent on the street (San Francisco-style) and starving? They are not eligible for welfare, right? So they won’t get anything funded by taxpayers other than K-12 school for the two children if they are old enough?
Russil: The unemployment rate of any country can easily be 0% if you make collecting welfare sufficiently lucrative. Unemployment rate counts only those who are looking for a job. One reason why immigrants in Canada seem to have a low unemployment rate is that they aren’t looking for a job to begin with.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-606-x/2012006/part-partie1-eng.htm
“Overall, 2008 was a peak year for the Canadian labour market. Both the rates of employment and labour force participation reached record highs (63.5% and 67.7%, respectively), and the unemployment rate hit an historic low of 6.1%. For core-aged immigrants, the employment rate was 77.4%, and the unemployment rate, 6.8%. The corresponding figures for their Canadian-born counterparts were 84.1% and 4.6%, respectively.”
So, compared to the native-born, 7% of the immigrants aren’t seeking employment at all (a tribute to the Canadian welfare state? busy at home raising 5 children?) and therefore cannot, by definition, be “unemployed.”
Philip: You’ll be pleased to know that about 10 years later, in 2017, the employment rate for immigrants who had been in Canada for at least 10 years was 82.0%, pretty close to the 84.0% employment rate for native-born Canadians. (For immigrants as a whole, it was 78.9%.) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/181224/dq181224a-eng.htm
“So the family is not only ‘low-income’ but ‘no-income.’ You say that they’re not eligible for ‘welfare’.”
A low-income household is not automatically eligible for welfare (“welfare” meaning what most people mean when they talk about welfare). So you can’t look at low-income stats and say, hey, all these people must be on welfare! There’s a lot of people working at low-wage jobs who are low-income, but aren’t on welfare.
The expectation in Canada is that welfare is only for people who can’t work. Our policies are aimed at full employment. If you’re capable of working, you should get a job. This includes single parents: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/family-social-supports/income-assistance/on-assistance/employment-planning/spei
And this expectation is held across the board, even by “lefty” people who sponsor refugees.
You brought up non-cash benefits. This seems like a US argument. Canada doesn’t have food stamps, free housing, free phones, or Medicaid. (We do have universal health insurance, which you can think of as a transfer from younger and healthier people to older and sicker people. The immigrant population is younger than the population as a whole, and also healthier than the population as a whole – if you’ve got an expensive condition you’re likely to be medically inadmissible.)
The whole “immigrants are going to go on welfare!!” argument seems like a US argument to me. When I think of immigrants, I think of the care aides working in nursing homes for $15/hour.
Are you happy about Trump’s April 22 suspension of legal immigration to the US?
The Massachusetts State Police, who as we all know like to kill as many people as possible in a short time, heartily recommend using AR15 as their all purpose ‘patrol rifle’ of choice.
https://www.cga.ct.gov/asaferconnecticut/tmy/0128/Michael%20Faucher%20-%20Putnam%20CT%202.pdf