Betcha can’t guess what number two is: Top Guns: What Americans Are Buying – “Gun sales are hitting the bullseye. Gun manufacturers, sports retailers, and even the FBI have noted a record numbers of sales and background checks, as reported by FOXBusiness.comOpens a New Window. The firearms industry is worth a whopping estimated $15 billion, and the … Read more
Canadian shooters don’t exactly live in a gun-owner’s paradise. Still, the news isn’t all bad up there. That image isn’t Photoshopped: it’s the Dominion Arms ‘Grizzly’ 8.5″ shotgun. It holds five shots and for our friends in the Great White North it’s in stock now for just $449 Canadian. But only for Canadians. Importation of individual firearms into the US is . . .
Shooters up North celebrated a rare gun-rights victory in April, when the Canadian federal government finally euthanized its expensive and useless ‘Long Gun Registry.’ The celebrations were short, however. Eager to appease suburban voters and swinging liberals, Ottawa promptly moved to ban ‘body armour.’ Then PM Stephen Harper’s ‘Conservative’ party has quietly announced that all Canadian gun owners will have to start paying a $60 fee to renew their firearm licenses every five years. It gets better: owners of handguns and other ‘restricted’ firearms (ooh, that sounds evil, doesn’t it?) have to fork over $80 . . .
Special to TTAG by Jim Sutherland: I live in Alberta Canada. The region is known as Texas North to the rest of Canada because Alberta likes to run its own show. Rural Albertans also live by a harsher code of justice when it comes to property theft. In short, justice might be dispensed on the spot by property owners. Two examples of frontier justice in Alberta involved quad thefts and a little ensuing gunplay.
We live right next door to the United States and share a very common North American culture and bond with Americans. We have a few philosophical and political differences that separate the two countries and they are contentious issues. Socialized medical care is a hot button issue in the States, yet it has been around here in Soviet Canuckistan for decades. It isn’t a perfect system, but it does allow equal access for all Canadians to health care. The upside is that a Canadian will not lose everything because of health issues beyond his or her control. Oddly enough, the Canadian government spends less per capital than the current US system. The other odd issue is that Canadians are up in arms about privatization for health care because it threatens the public system. The complete opposite of debate in Washington these days with the US issues, in many ways. Which brings me to the gun control issue in Canada vis a vis the ongoing debate in the United States.
In 1989, Marc Lépine entered Montreal University’s École Polytechnique engineering school armed with a Ruger Mini-14 and murdered 14 people. Six years after the École Polytechnique Massacre (a.k.a. The Montreal Massacre), the Canadian parliament passed Bill C-68. The Firearms Act mandated that all Canadian long gun buyers—and hunters visiting Canada from abroad—register their weapons with the government. And a whole lot more, including a blanket clause deeming any citizen ineligible for registration if the rejection “is in the interests of the safety of that or any other person,” stating that “an inspector may at any reasonable time enter and inspect any place where the inspector believes on reasonable grounds a business is being carried on or there is a record of a business, any place in which the inspector believes on reasonable grounds there is a gun collection or a record in relation to a gun collection or any place in which the inspector believes on reasonable grounds there is a prohibited firearm,” and giving the Justice Minister the power to ban any weapon he or she chooses without judicial or parliamentary review. And so on. Conservative critics have now moved to eliminate the registry. And the battle is joined . . .
“The Queen is the symbolic head of Canada and the Commonwealth. She has exactly zero power. I, too, am a citizen but I regard myself as more free than you because I don’t need to own a gun to feel safe. I am well steeped in world history, in contradistinction to most Americans (sounds like you fit the bill) who believe they are the centre of the universe.” Holy Neighbour to the North Batman! Does Canadian columnist Daniel Johnson of the Salem-News.com have a chip on his shoulder or what? Nasty ass nationalism aside, Mr. Johnson’s editorial Socrates’ Gun offers excellent insights into the mindset of those who oppose armed civilians. For students of rhetorical combat, Mr. Johnson also provides a textbook example of the technique called reductio ad absurdum. Make the jump to see the psychology of gun control, and one of the best anti-gun control comments ever written . . .
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