I’ve been meaning to write something about Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada for about 2 years now, mostly as a follow-up to my 2013 post about the British bans. I kept putting it off. Partly because the subject is annoying, and partly because I knew I’d end up rewriting it a hundred times anyway.
I decided to get GPT to fact-check some things for me, and since it’s getting pretty good at putting things together in my style now, I got it to write me an outline for this based on my notes and questions, which I then butchered. My GPT instance named itself Arlo – So thanks, Arlo. My first GPT-sorted weblog post, which now I don’t have to write a separate post about!
As an aside, I think I once promised to write something at least once a decade in this weblog. I failed, sorry.
A small note, the same as in the 2013 post – I am probably going to refer to guns, I know that guns are usually artillery, but I am using the general term to cover long guns and handguns. See that post for the distinctions, I just don’t want to complicate things.
Back in 2020, Trudeau suddenly banned over 1,500 models of what the anti-gun folks like to call “assault-style” firearms. No parliamentary debate, no vote, just an executive action that came out of nowhere. They called it a public safety measure, but it has always felt more like a PR move, something to make headlines and gain some short-term victory with people who don’t know the first thing about guns.
The ban was full of contradictions. It targeted rifles that looked scary but were, functionally, no different from many hunting rifles. Meanwhile, it left out the SKS, a semi-automatic battlefield rifle from the 1940s that still has its folding bayonet attached. Designed for the Red Army after WW2, the SKS was a short-lived predecessor to the much more famous AK-47. When the AK-47 proved more effective (as it still is today), millions of unused SKS rifles were packed into crates, coated in cosmoline (a brown waxy petroleum jelly), and stored away. Sixty years later, someone decided to start selling them in bulk to Canada, an ideal market being one of the only Western countries that still allowed firearms imports from Russia and China (unlike the USA).
The SKS fires cheap and readily available 7.62x39mm ammunition, and quickly became popular in Canada. Sellers could buy grease-filled wooden crates of them for a few hundred dollars, some of them brand new, some obviously used. Individual rifles went for as little as $80 if you were willing to clean off the gunk yourself or $30 or so extra for them to be shiny and clean. Prices have gone up considerably since then, with decent examples now selling for over $500. Any compensation for banning them would need to reflect that big increase in price since the 2020 ban.
Somehow, the SKS, the military rifle of the Soviet Union after WW2, with its folding bayonet, is fine, and not an assault weapon. The official line was that the SKS is used by Indigenous hunters, so it was left alone out of respect for that. This sounds thoughtful, until you realise it’s also the rifle that would cost the most to buy back. Suddenly the official line sounds like a completely bollocks excuse. There are probably well over a million SKS rifles in the country, all of them unregistered. Nobody knows who has them or how many there are. If they’d banned the SKS, it would have caused an absolute logistical and financial nightmare, so they didn’t. This is where the logic of the whole ban starts to crumble. It stops being about consistent principles and becomes about politics, cost, and convenience. This was a key decision that exposes the contradictions at the heart of a mess that Canada is still reckoning with.
Trudeau’s gun ban didn’t just hit long guns, it blindsided handgun owners and collectors too. In 2022 a new action decreed that there would be no new handgun sales, no transfers, nothing. The regulation and rules for handguns have always been very strict in Canada so this was really targeting the most regulated, licenced, and well trained people. This ban really stung because a lot of us have spent years building legal collections. Mostly for the sport or for historical collecting – But also as what used to be a guaranteed investment. I have handguns I was planning to sell off as part of my retirement, but I can’t anymore. Now they just sit there, locked up and essentially worthless. The Liberal government talks about compensation but it’ll never reflect the actual value, especially for antiques and rarities. It’ll be a pretty paltry sum if anything ever comes of it at all.
The enforcement side of things is also going to be a farce. Most of the newly banned rifles were never registered, so no one knows who’s got what. They’re not going to be handed in, they’ll get stashed, stored, or buried until a Conservative government gets in and reverses the bans. Same with handguns, although these are registered so they’re at least on the books for now. Since the ban, people have died and suddenly those handguns have gone missing. Not many folks are ringing up the RCMP to hand them over, so they are slipping out into the grey market. I know of people who’ve had those quiet conversations: Grampy didn’t tell us what happened to them… The cops can’t arrest a corpse, can they?
The thing is that none of this is a surprise. When you treat people like criminals, they start behaving like criminals. Generally not out of malice, but out of a sense of self-preservation. We had a well-regulated system that most gun owners followed to the letter. We locked our cabinets, took our courses, filed our paperwork, and played by the rules. Now those rules are gone, and nobody trusts the system anymore. People do what they feel they have to, especially when a struggling government starts seizing their property on the back of a flimsy and inconsistent political excuse.
What’s worse is that it won’t even help. Most major gun crime in Canada doesn’t come from legal gun owners. The two notable exceptions are the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre and the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting, both involving legally owned firearms. But the shootings that triggered these bans were carried out almost entirely with illegal guns – smuggled or stolen. Instead of tackling the sources of those illegal firearms, Trudeau’s government went after the easy target with big PR value: licenced owners. The vast majority of licenced Canadian gun owners are incredibly law-abiding (if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have stuck to all the obscure rules for this long), and it’s much easier to demonise people than to address the real causes. The unlicenced ones are already criminals, so no new laws were needed there, just better enforcement of existing ones.
It was all just obvious desperation and security theatre. A Prime Minister with sinking poll numbers trying to score points with people who wouldn’t know a restricted PAL from a banana clip [That was a good one Arlo, I left that in!]. The result was that a few million Canadians were suddenly labelled as potential threats, just for owning the same thing they did the day before and leaving taxpayers, and whichever government comes next with a multi-billion dollar bill.
None of it makes sense if you assume the government were trying to improve safety. It only makes sense if you realise they were trying to win a news cycle. A month ago, I’d have said the Conservatives were a surefire bet to win, and this is a single-issue election topic for a lot of people as was seen in rural elections in 2024. Even if you’re not a gun owner, you ought to be pissed off about how this was pushed through by executive action, without any real reason, consistency, or evidence. Trump’s threatened war with Canada (trade and territorial) has changed the polls in the next election, and given Pee Pee’s love of Trump I’d hope these people would vote Liberal now. I don’t think many will – I’m not even sure I would, but thankfully I can’t vote anyway, so I don’t have to agonise about it.
If the Liberals lose because they pissed off 3 million gun owners for short-term propaganda gains, it’d serve them right.
Notes:
. Pee Pee is Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s Conservative leader. Endorsed by Trump and backed by American billionaires. May the gods save Canada if that whiney orange teat-sucker gets in.
. There’s an SKS unboxing video showing some of the cosmoline here on YouTube.
