COVID-19 crisis demonstrates how wasteful the Liberal gun buyback will be

As Canada and the rest of the world pours their resources into fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing is increasingly clear to everyone: if and when another crisis like this appears, we need to be much more prepared. 

How should we prepare? Well, that’s for governments to sort out and consult the experts on. All we know as average Canadian taxpayers is that, prepared or not, fighting a global pandemic costs a lot of money. Our political leaders need to be wise about how they spend taxpayer dollars during good times so that we are able to spend the billions needed to fight whatever crisis appears in the future. 

One such example of what not to spend our money on is the Liberal’s promised gun buyback program. The buyback, which would focus on “military-style assault rifles”, according to the Liberal Party’s platform, is estimated to cost anywhere from $400 to $600 million and would buy back an estimated 250,000 firearms. 

The National Firearms Association estimates costs will double or triple that figure, possibly exceeding $2 billion. So far, the Liberals have only budgeted $250 million to cover the cost of this campaign promise. Underestimating the cost of an already wasteful and fruitless promise is not what a responsible government would do. 

The list of firearms that are considered dangerous “assault weapons” is still being developed, according to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair. Could it include your firearm? Only time will tell which firearms fall under the loose category of “military-grade” according to the Trudeau government. 

Would such a buyback ever be worth it? Well, the data on the results in Australia is mixed at best. While there was an overall decrease in gun deaths, from 2.9 per 100,000 people to 0.9 per 100,000, pinning down the exact reasons for such a decline is next to impossible. 

To put those numbers in context, Canada’s death by firearms rate is 2.0 per 100,000. However, if you remove suicides from that number, it falls to just 0.79 per 100,000. In comparison to the American rate of 12.21 per 100,000, nevermind the socialist disaster state of Venezuela’s absurd rate of 49.22 per 100,000, Canada is a very safe country. 

New Zealand, which instituted its own buyback program last year following the deadly Christchurch terror attack, has a death by firearms rate of only 1.07 per 100,000. If you remove suicides from that number, it falls to 0.16 per 100,000. That’s equivalent to only three in every 2 million New Zealanders! Despite the atrocities of Christchurch, it’s hard to see how a buyback could push that number any lower. 

In addition to not being effective and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, of which thousands of law-abiding Canadian firearms owners have already contributed to, it also takes legal and regulated firearms away from those who have gone through the proper channels to acquire them. 

As we’ve covered here at TNT before, purchasing a firearm is not a quick or cheap process in Canada. There are courses to take, licenses to register for, paperwork to file, gun safes to buy and fees to pay – especially if you’re looking to purchase the types of firearms the Liberals are looking to target. 

Enacting a buyback program is a wasteful and draconian response to the issue of firearm deaths. Focusing on the source of the crime, the criminal gangs that are responsible for the vast amount of gun crime in Canada, as the government has begun to do, is a much more promising policy measure. 

During a time of crisis, the Trudeau government must act in a responsible and unifying manner. Continuing with their buyback plan not only fails to do that, but it also wastes precious government resources that need to be allocated towards saving lives, not harassing law-abiding Canadians.