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Law Abiding Citizens

So I have a question for everybody who wants a complete gun ban in Canada. Why is it that people who obey and follow the laws cannot own guns? Why is it that since a criminal commits a crime with a gun, they think that nobody should be able to own a gun? The logic with this is extremely flawed, because if they apply this to gun owners then wouldn’t that mean that they would have to apply it to everything? Would they be willing to ban all vehicles and cell phones for every accident that was caused by distracted driving? The answer is no, they wouldn’t. So my next question is, why do they think it is acceptable when it comes to firearms and firearm ownership?

Just something to think about.

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Punishment for Criminals

The criminal justice system in Canada is a joke, real criminals don’t get the amount of jail time that they should. I say this mainly because of the sentencing that follows murder. For the majority of murder cases in Canada, the convict will get a “life” sentence. I put that in quotation marks because “life in prison”doesn’t mean the same thing as the other majority of the world. When somebody gets a life sentence in Canada, they are usually eligible for parole and get it after about 25 years.

If you ask me this is not long enough for the criminal who committed one of the worst crimes that a human can commit. And until we crack down on the sentencing in Canada we are not going to see a decline in criminal activity, the government can add all the new laws that they want but until they provide an incentive for them not to commit crimes they will continue to.

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Long Gun Laws

There is one more post that I should have made a while ago when I was talking about gun laws and classifications. (Keep in mind that on my first post ever, I said that I may be incorrect about some things and you should always talk to a professional)

Long gun laws can get very confusing so I am going to keep it as simple as I can. Long guns can fall in any of the three categories that I mentioned in a previous post, all depending on their function, barrel length and caliber that it shoots. If a long gun is full-auto or a full auto converted to a semi-auto it is prohibited. If a long gun is under 18.5 inches it is restricted unless it is chambered in .22 caliber then it is non-restricted. And if it is over 18.5 inches it is typically non-restricted.

Now lets talk about magazine capacity. Most long guns that are semi-auto are limited to five rounds in a magazine, unless one of the following applies. 1. it is chambered in .22 caliber (I am not sure about the restriction for magazine capacity for .22 I don’t think there is one but I could be wrong.) or 2. it takes a handgun magazine in which case it is limited to the ten rounds that a handgun is limited to.

Now if a gun has a tubeular magazine like a lever action has, then I believe that the magazine cannot be longer then the barrel of the gun and how ever many rounds you can fit is its limit. (Again I may be wrong). So, with that said if a firearm is chambered in .357 then the amount of rounds that you can fit in it will be smaller then if it is chambered in .22.

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Facts vs Emotion

When the topic of firearms is brought up a lot of people who are on the anti-gun side have a tendency to resort to the emotional side of people in order to get more people to agree with them. This is very problematic because when people start to let emotion instead of facts run their decision making then they are going to make some very poor decisions.

I’ve seen this used in so many debates, not just firearms but other topics as well. When it is used with the topic of firearms people generally say something along the lines of, don’t you care about the dead kids from school shooters? (They are usually in reference to the United States so that is what I will focus on) Of course I care about them, as I stated before I think a school shooting is one of the most tragic events to take place in the present time period. However, in the United States, mass shootings only take up about 3-5% of all gun deaths. And as I stated in a previous post, the United States is the only country in the world that counts suicide by gun as death by gun. So, if we take suicide out of there then that accounts for about 66% of gun deaths. Then, the vast majority of the number that we have left is from criminal activity usually, it is because of gangs and/or drugs. The rest of the number is from people potentially being careless with their firearms and they accidentally fire it.

See, so people need to quit letting emotions make decisions for them, and if they really want to address gun crime they need to address the real issues when it comes to gun deaths. 

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Conceal Carry/Stand your Ground Laws

Yesterday I talked about the right to be able to protect yourself in your own house, today I am going to talk about the right to be able to defend your life anywhere you are. What this means is; say for example you are in a store and someone decides to rob it, if we had conceal or open carry with stand your ground laws you would be able to terminate the threat in the name of self preservation. This law is a part of 25 U.S. states and I think that should be incorporated into Canadian law, here’s why.

As I stated yesterday, I think that it should be every human’s right to be able to defend yourself in a life or death situation, in your home. Today I am going to take that even further and say that it should be every human’s right to be able to defend yourself or somebody else anywhere you are. In the Canadian Charter of rights and freedoms it says that we have the right to self defense but yet what does this mean seeing as we could go to jail for second degree murder in the act of defending ourselves. To be honest I don’t know, but if want to be guaranteed this right we need to incorporate the castle doctrine, conceal/open carry and stand your ground laws. These three things will allow Canadians to be able to defend the lives of themselves and others, and ultimately I think it will result in a reduction of crime, as criminals will not commit these crimes if there is a possibility that they will get shot. 

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Corona Virus and Guns

So, for my post today I decided to stray away from the content that I usually post, and I wanted to relate firearms to what is happening in the world right now. 

In Canada with everything that is going on, gun stores all over the country are experiencing a major spike in sales, from more people wanting to get their firearms licences ranging to people buying brand new guns. One of the gun stores that I really like actually had to close the doors to the store from Monday to Wednesday in order to be able to make all of their shipments from online orders. For most if not all of these gun stores, this is an unprecedented amount of sales, and it begs the question as to why sales are spiking?

My theory is that with the times that we are in right now there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what is going to happen in the future. People are asking questions like; are we going to run out of food, are people going to rob us for our resources, will we have enough toilet paper. These are quite extreme examples however they are still valid. My point is that when you live in uncertain times like these it is nice to be able to rely on that extra little bit of security, and when you own a gun you feel safe and secure like you can defend yourself if the world does go into mass panic.

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Castle Doctrine

So, before I get into this post I just want to explain to those of you who are not familiar with what the castle doctrine is. Essentially what this is, is the right to defend yourself and your property by any means necessary.

Being able to defend yourself should be a basic human right, if somebody has broken into your house or is on your property and is acting in a threatening manner or is trying to attack/kill you, you should be able to use the amount of force that you deem necessary to defend your life or the life of another person. This should be a basic human right but unfortunately in Canada it is not, in most cases you are looking at jail time and in some cases you are looking at a second degree murder charge. Even if the other person has attempted to kill you, you are still not authorized to use deadly force you can only hide or restrain them. This is outrageous and introducing the castle doctrine into Canada would help save innocent lives.

I think that the biggest problem with it is that the people who make the laws have no idea what it is like to live in a town or in the country where the police are upwards of 45-60 minutes away. Most people who make the laws live in big cities where police can be there in only a couple minutes, but when you live where police could take up to an hour to get to you, you need to be able to take maters into your own hands in order to save your life.

There are multiple examples of cases in Canada where a homeowner was attacked and ended up killing one of their assailants and the homeowner was charged with either some sort of murder charge or manslaughter.

One case that comes to mind took place in Manitoba. In September of 2016 a man woke up to the feeling of a stabbing pain in his head, when he woke up he realized he had been stabbed. I will spare you the details of the events that transpired after but it ended with the intruder being killed. The homeowner was sentenced to 5 years in jail for the charge of manslaughter.

This is why Canadians need the right to defend ourselves, because if stuff starts to go down, we should be able to protect our lives and the lives of others if it comes down to it, without having to worry about a murder charge.

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Are Canada’s Gun Law Too Tough?

Some of the gun laws in Canada are ridiculously strenuous, some of these laws can send people who did ultimately nothing wrong, obviously I am not suggesting that we loosen the sentence on murder or something like that. Some of the laws that I am talking about for example are not carrying your authorization to transport (ATT) and registration. This is something that you will receive when you purchase a restricted firearm to prove that you are allowed to transport that gun to the range.

If you are at the range and shooting a restricted firearm and don’t have your ATT or registration certificate, a first offence carries a jail term not exceeding 2 years. Yes you can actually go to jail for not having a little piece of paper with you when you are shooting. Even if it were a $100 fine I would still make sure that I had those pieces of paper, but certainly not jail time.

It is gun laws like this that need to be loosened, they do nothing to stop gun crime and carry extremely harsh consequences for people that just want to go shoot some targets.

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Long Gun Registration

One of the gun laws that the Trudeau Liberals are proposing is the reintroduction of the long gun registry. And I say reintroduction because the Liberals attempted this in the past back in the mid 90′s under Jean Chrétien and it was a massive failure. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and ultimately did nothing to stop gun crime. As I have established in the past, the guns that are used in crime are not long guns, they are handguns that are illegally smuggled into Canada.

It’s not only Conservatives that oppose the proposed registry and gun ban, the RCMP chiefs have also opposed the gun ban and registry, saying that it will do nothing to stop gun crime. One of the police chiefs in question is the now Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair. Now what is interesting about this is that Bill Blair has played a significant role in the proposed registry and the gun ban, even though you can find videos of him saying that they will not work when he was in the RCMP. So why the sudden change of heart, why is he supporting something that he was previously against? It’s just something to talk about.

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Proposed Gun Confiscation

It baffles me that people actually believe the media and politicians when they say that a gun ban would work. I always ask why. Bans of anything have not worked in the past, so why would they work now. A gun ban would solve nothing because the guns that are used in crime in Canada are already illegal, and if it ever would come down to it and the government said to everyone “turn in your guns” only the law abiding citizens would, and the criminals would not. Then the only ones with the guns would be the criminals.

I always like to give this example when debating about guns. Should we make it illegal for people to text and drive in order to stop car accidents caused by distracted driving ;). This stops most people dead in their tracks as they don’t know how to respond, as they realize that just because something is illegal it doesn’t mean that it will stop criminals from committing crimes. It’s the same idea when it comes to a gun ban, banning guns will not stop gun crime just like making distracted driving illegal will not stop car accidents caused by that.

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Bad Media Coverage

When it comes to the media talking about firearms they are slightly biased towards the anti-gun side of things to say the least. Whenever there is a crime committed with a gun they always push for the ban of firearms.

The media likes to misdirect the public by throwing scary looking numbers on the screen, especially in the United States. Just a quick side note, the United States is the only country in the world that counts suicide by a gun as a gun death, and this accounts for 66% of all gun deaths in America.

Whenever there is a shooting, the media uses that to their advantage, to try and push their anti-gun agenda. I am not saying that these shootings are a good thing, they are one of the worst crimes if not the worst that a human can commit. However, it is unfair of the media to use them to push their agenda. Most firearms owners are just hunters and/or target shooters and just want to be left in peace but whenever we see a criminal commit a crime with guns we have to clench our teeth and hope that we (the ones who don’t commit any crimes with guns and do nothing wrong) won’t have our guns taken away.

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Misconceptions about the AR-15

One of the guns that the media loves to talk about in a negative light is the AR-15 (Bad media coverage will be my next topic). There are many misconceptions out there about the AR-15 that the media is the cause of. The first one that I will address is the “Assault Rifle” misconception. Thanks to the media people believe that the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” when in fact it doesn’t it actually stands for ArmaLite Rifle and ArmaLite is the company that made the AR-15. Assault rifle is not a legally defined term in Canada, but when people say it I assume that they are talking about a fully-automatic firearm 

The next one is that we need to ban the AR-15, to that I ask, why? The AR-15 is rarely ever used in crime in Canada, the guns that are used in the overwhelming vast majority of crime are illegally smuggled handguns.

The final misconception that I want to address is that no one needs an AR-15. Why not, they are really fun and easy to shoot which makes them perfect for target practice out on the range. There are other reasons as to why people need AR-15′s but I don’t want to make this post too long.

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Universal Firearm Rules

Now that you have a working knowledge of the gun laws in Canada, it is time that I go over the  universal firearm rules for safe handling of a firearm. In Canada we have two acronyms that we follow; ACTS and PROVE.

Assume that the firearm is loaded (treat every gun as if t were loaded)

Control the muzzle (end of barrel) direction at all times

Trigger finger of the trigger and out of the trigger guard until you are ready to shoot

See that the firearm is safe you must PROVE it safe

Point the muzzle in the safest possible direction

Remove any ammunition

Observe the chamber

Verify the feeding path

Examine the bore

If you want you could probably find a video on YouTube where someone actually shows you how to do this.

Once you have done all of these things the firearm is now proved to be safe. Do this every time you handle a gun even if the person before you has done it, they may have made a mistake and when it comes to guns if someone makes a mistake it could cost someone else their life. 

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Storage/Transport Laws

This will be a relatively shorter post then what I usually do because this is a smaller topic.

So I will go over non restricted first. For transporting non-restricted you either need to have a lock (trigger or chain lock) on the gun or it needs to be in a case (the case does not need to be locked). For storing them they must be unloaded, and you either need to have a lock and be out of sight or in a safe (either or will suffice). Unless you live in the country and have predators in the area in which case you can have it anywhere around the house provided that it is unloaded.

For transporting restricted and prohibited they need to have both a lock on the gun and be in a locked hard case. For storing them it is similar, they gun needs to have a lock on it and it needs to be in a safe. You are not allowed to have these around the house in the country even if you do have a predator problem, that law only pertains to non-restricted firearms.

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Prohibited

The final classification of firearms in Canada is prohibited. So what makes a firearm prohibited, there are numerous ways in which a firearm may become prohibited. Including; handguns with a barrel length under the previously stated barrel length (105 mm or 4.135 inches), handguns that shoot .25 or .32 caliber, fully automatic firearms (when you hold the trigger and the gun keeps shooting), and firearms that have been converted from full-auto to semi-auto (one trigger pull = one bullet fired).

There is another reason that some firearms get prohibited this is called an Order in Council (O.I.C). This is when certain guns are called to be prohibited, and it could be for no reason at all. Many “Military Style Assault Rifles” have been banned like this for no reason at all. The reason I put quotation marks before is because people have a misunderstanding when it comes to this. “Military Style Assault Rifle” is not a legally defined term in Canada if you are referencing a fully automatic firearm then we have already established that those are banned in Canada for the most part. People think that the AR-15 is a an assault rifle when if fact it is not, an AR-15 which I have already pointed out is semi-automatic. Also, a lot of people think that the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” when it does not, it actually stands for ArmaLite Rifle and ArmaLite is the company that made the AR-15.

You can own prohibited firearms in Canada, so the question is, how? In order to own prohibited firearms in Canada they would have had to be owned when they were either non-restricted or restricted (differs from gun to gun). Then grandfathered down throughout their family, this is how you can become licensed to own one. You can only sell prohibited firearms to other people who are allowed to have them, and no more new ones are allowed to enter Canada.

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Restricted

Yesterday I informed you all about non-restricted weapons, where you can shoot them and what makes a firearm qualify as a non-restricted. Today I am going to talk about restricted weapons.

Restricted weapons are different from non-restricted in almost every aspect, you can only shoot them at certified ranges, there are stricter storage laws (I will talk about storage laws in a later post) and you cannot hunt with them.

So, what kinds of guns are restricted? All handguns by default are either restricted or prohibited (depending on the barrel length) which means the only thing you can do with them is target shoot at any certified range in the province in which you reside. Handguns in order to not be prohibited the barrel length is required to be 105 mm (4.134 inches) Some AR-15′s are restricted too, like I said in my previous post, it depends on the barrel length which as I feel that I have made abundantly clear is very confusing, there are exceptions for some guns that don’t apply to others. To my knowledge any firearm that has a barrel length equal to or less then 16 inches, fires center-fire ammunition, in a semi-automatic fashion (one trigger pull for each bullet) and can fire a bigger caliber then .22, then the gun would be restricted.

One other law that follows all restricted firearms, is that they must be registered to the RCMP upon purchase.

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Non-Restricted

In my previous post I informed you on how many types of classifications of firearms there are and how you can acquire two of the three types of gun licenses in Canada. Now I am going to define in more detail what makes a gun fall under the classification that it does, each classification will be on its own post. When you go in depth with the classifications of firearms it can get very confusing for pretty well everybody, so I am going to do a more in depth basic description if that makes sense.

I said in my previous post that a non-restricted firearm is a hunting rifle and most shotguns, it can get very complicated and I don’t want to confuse anybody, so I am just going to stick with a more basic description. A non-restricted firearm is your stereotypical hunting rifle and shotgun. However, some AR’s are also classified as non restricted due to the barrel length and the overall length of the gun. In order for a gun to be non-restricted the barrel length of the gun (the barrel is the tube of which the bullet comes out) must be over 406 mm (about 16 inches) and the overall length has to be 660 mm (about 26 inches).

So where can you shoot and carry a non-restricted firearm? You are allowed to carry any type of firearm with you, as long as you are permitted to shoot it there. For example, if you own a piece of property out in the country you are allowed to carry any non-restricted firearm with you because you can shoot a non-restricted any where. (not in town or by a highway or something like that but you get the idea). The reasoning for this is because almost all non-restricted firearms are used for hunting or pest/predator control.

However, on the other hand you are only allowed to fire restricted and prohibited firearms at a certified gun range so you can’t just carry a handgun with you around your property because you are not permitted to shoot it there. (More to come in my next two posts about restricted and prohibited firearms).

I do apologize if anything is confusing, if it is then I recommend watching a YouTube video about non-restricted firearms. Furthermore if something I said is false (it shouldn’t be) feel free to correct me.