A year ago, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree admitted, in a bombshell recording with a gun owner, that the Liberal government’s “assault-style firearm” ban and confiscation program isn’t driven by public safety or gun crime concerns but by campaign promises and pressure from the Province of Quebec. Minister Anandasangaree, overseeing the department that implements and enforces the gun ban and confiscation, was recorded as saying the reason the Liberals were moving forward with the program was opportunistic: it “is something that’s very much a big, big, big deal for many of the Quebec electorate that voted for us.” Summing up the program as a whole, he stated, “don’t ask me to explain the logic to you on this.”
Fresh evidence has now emerged to confirm that the Liberal government’s rationale is just so much political balderdash.
Conservative Member of Parliament Alex Ruff (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound) made a formal inquiry regarding the ban and confiscation program and asked specifically for “the government’s definition for assault-style firearms” and whether the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) “collects data on gun crimes for assault-style firearms.”
After all, the entire impetus for the ban and confiscation law has been, consistently, persistently and unequivocally, the government’s assertions that the now-prohibited “assault-style” firearms are exclusively “military caliber, military grade” weapons not “designed for hunting or for sport shooting” but for the battlefield, with “no legitimate civilian purpose,” and that the law would prevent crime and “reduce armed violence in Canada.” Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney repeated the public safety justification again this year, defending his government’s gun confiscation and buyback as a means of “decisively” combating gun crime by removing “prohibited assault-style firearms from communities” and building “a safer, more secure Canada for all.”
Judging by the government’s answer to MP Ruff’s questions, nothing in these claims and justifications holds any water.
“There is no legal definition of an assault-style firearm,” states the September 21 response from Minister Anandasangaree. The banned guns “share common technical characteristics, namely semi-automatic action with sustained rapid-fire capability (tactical or military design with large capacity magazine) that were deemed unsuitable for civilian use as they can inflict significant harm and can increase the severity of mass shootings.” Inexplicably, though, “quite a few low-power .22 rifles” (a.k.a. “plinkers”) made it onto the banned gun blacklist, guns that were emphatically not “designed for the battlefield.”
Contrary to the claim of “sustained rapid-fire capability,” semiautomatic firearms can only fire a single shot with each pull of the trigger, unlike fully automatic firearms developed for military use in combat. Descriptions used in the government’s response (“tactical,” “military design” and “large capacity”) are, like “assault-style,” vague terms with no definite meaning but which bulk up the scare factor. The important detail is the admission that these are all firearms the government has “deemed unsuitable for civilian use.”
The answer on gun crimes involving “assault-style” firearms is just as revealing. The RCMP, it states, “does not collect data specifically regarding gun crimes for assault-style firearms” and the “level of detail of the information requested is not tracked within the existing internal database.” In fact, the RCMP “concluded that producing and validating a comprehensive response to this question would require a manual collection of information that is not possible in the time allotted and this could lead to the disclosure of incomplete and misleading information.”
These are fatal admissions to the credibility of the program, given the government’s insistence on the havoc these particular weapons have wreaked, especially as the data sets for firearms traces from the RCMP’s Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre apparently do include (in addition to pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns) categories for unusual items like “air guns/pellet guns, [and] airsoft” guns, cannons, “combination guns,” grenade launchers, and mortars. The class of firearm at the heart of the gun ban and confiscation, though, doesn’t feature in the RCMP’s crime statistics. How, then, can anyone assess whether this incredibly expensive and misconceived program has had the slightest impact on the use of these guns in crime?
The answer is simple: They cannot.
In the meantime, the list of banned guns has expanded. Canada’s original 2020 ban and confiscation law applied to approximately 1,500 models of firearms but has since ballooned to include over 2,500 models, “including numerous models frequently used by Canadians for hunting and sport shooting.”
These disclosures undermine as illusory the entire “public safety” justification for the ban and confiscation program and expose what responsible gun owners on both sides of the border have long known to be the truth: an “assault-style” firearm/ “assault” weapon is anything the government wants it to be.
Legal challenges to “assault weapon” bans and the authority of the government to impose these arbitrary classifications are currently pending before the highest courts in both countries. (In Canada, see Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, et al. v. Attorney General of Canada, No. 41859, scheduled for a hearing on November 9; in the United States, the case is Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, consolidated with Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, with oral arguments on December 2.)
In a telling illustration of the differences between the two countries, while Minister Anandasangaree has “said he and fellow Liberals look[] forward to ‘robustly defending the government’s position’ before the Supreme Court,” the United States government has filed an amicus brief in support of the challenge and urges the United States Supreme Court to rule that such bans are unconstitutional.
To quote from the conclusion of the NRA’s amicus brief in Viramontes, it’s clear by now that these bans and the justifications underlying them are bogus, “fiddle-faddle, flapdoodle, and bunkum.”
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