Canada’s gun “buyback” experience has now gone from bad to worse, drawing the attention of a top U.S. gun-rights organizations.
Last year, the Canadian government added another 179 makes and models of firearms to the country’s banned “assault-style” firearms list. But as of late July, the government had only been able to collect less than 13,000 of the hundreds of thousands of guns it has banned possession of over the past several years.
Not able to understand why gun owners wouldn’t just turn their guns in like good, obedient servants, the tone-deaf government even commissioned a study called “Understanding Firearms Owners” to determine why people aren’t making their job easier.
Now, a pilot program set up by the government to get the confiscation ball rolling has resulted in a dismal failure. According to a report at the National Post, only 25 firearms were turned in as part of the “test run,” which was aimed at collecting 200 banned guns. The total was only 12% of their goal—not a good success figure at all.
That prompted Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee to Keep and Bear Arms, to declare the “buyback” an “embarrassing bust.”
“It looks like Canadian gun owners are having none of this buyback foolishness, at least for the time being,” Gottlieb said in a news release on the confiscation effort. “Now Canadian officials are claiming the pilot program merely needs to be clarified, and that more instructions are necessary to ‘facilitate participation.’ They’re trying to put a happy face on a clearly sad effort to disarm the nation’s law-abiding gun owners.”
In fact, gun-rights supporters who live in Canada have long stressed that the compensated confiscation effort is a logistically impossible enterprise that, despite the government’s desire, cannot work.
“No matter how the Canadian government portrays this outrage, it amounts to compensated confiscation,” Gottlieb said. “Citizens are required to turn in their banned firearms and get a check from the government, or they could face legal consequences. The Canadians call this a ‘buyback,’ but the government never owned those guns in the first place. The term creates a false impression that fundamental rights come from government, and can be rescinded essentially on a whim.”
While praising the fact that Americans have a safeguard against such efforts—the Second Amendment—Gottlieb also stressed how the Canadian government just can’t see the truth of the matter.
“Nonsense like this, underscores the importance of our Second Amendment here in the United States, and all of the right-to-bear-arms provisions in a majority of state constitutions,” he concluded. “Truly free people should never be required to surrender their arms, no matter how much money the government offers in compensation, because it reduces a right to the level of a government regulated privilege. Fundamental rights, whether specifically delineated in a constitution or not, can never be for sale at any price. Our fellow gun owners north of the border obviously understand this by not participating in the test run. If the government in Ottawa doesn’t see what happened, they are deaf, dumb and blind.”
Ultimately, it remains to be seen whether the government will ever get the “buyback” program off the ground enough to confiscate a substantial number of firearms. One thing is for certain, though: Every gun owner who has his or her gun confiscated is both a little less free and a little less safe than before the travesty.
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