Shootings Spike As Liberals Target Gun Owners And Not Criminals

Written By Wyatt Claypool, Posted on August 5, 2023

As Canada experiences a rise in crime, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government are still going after law-abiding gun owners’ ability to keep their firearms. 

Last week, Statistics Canada released the numbers from the 2022 Unified Crime Reporting survey and found that crime has risen from 2020 to 2022 by 5.3 percent, with violent crime specifically going up 9 percent nationwide. 

You will remember that 2020 was the year Justin Trudeau and then Public Saftey Minister Bill Blair passed an Order In Council (OIC) “assault-style” rifle ban, and then began pursuing other OIC and legislative sale/ownership bans on an increasingly large list of rifles and handguns. 

Rather obviously, despite the Liberal government pushing these gun bans in response to the mass shooting in Nova Scotia (perpetrated with illegal guns), shootings and other violent crime is still rising. It turns out that when you eliminate minimum sentences for various firearm offenses (including illegal possession) you increase the incentives for criminals to carry and use firearms. 

Recently Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre posted crime statistics from cities in Eastern Canada.

The trend is startlingly sharp just between the years 2021 and 2022. The economy isn’t great but we are in no real crisis, and there has not been major social unrest in Canada, so the rise in crime can only be a reaction to the weakening of criminal justice policy.

The Liberals viewing criminals as sorts of victims needing a lighter touch in the justice system has only made them even more brazen. 

The National Telegraph reached out to the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR) and spoke to both Executive Director Rod Giltaca and VP of Public Relations Tracey Wilson

Giltaca pointed out that two of the worst years for gun violence are now owned by the Trudeau Liberals, but they are still pushing misinformation about legal gun ownership being part of the problem.

Giltaca state: 

Stats Can reports that this past year in 2022, Canada experienced the most firearm related homicides in the history of statistics in Canada at 342. But it actually gets worse, the second highest year in recorded history was 2021. Even though third place doesn’t belong to 2020, that record was set in 1975, 4th place goes to 2020 at 279 murders involving firearms. It doesn’t take an expert in crime statistics to figure out what the Liberals are doing both isn’t working and quantifiably represents a threat to the Canadian public.

Even the Toronto police have had enough of Trudeau and his disinformation. In a recent press conference, inspector Proctor stated that only 3% of all the firearms they’ve recovered in crimes that were traceable originated from a legal Source within Canada. But most frustratingly, the federal government’s focus is almost entirely on licensed gun owners. You don’t need to be an expert in this topic to see that there’s a serious problem here.

Wilson echoed what Rod Giltaca, adding that:

The Liberal Prime Minister has been hyper-focused on legal, licensed sport shooters and hunters, despite every credible expert disagreeing with his policies. As a result, the Liberal public safety record speaks for itself and has been proven out to be a dangerous failure.

Canadians deserve to not just “feel” safe with meaningless funding announcements and politically driven gun bans. We all deserve to actually be safe.

Hopefully, with the firing of another failed public safety minister, and a dramatic shift in the polls, relief may be on the way.

Although Wilson and Giltaca hope for the Liberals turn their anti-gun owner policy around, as all legal firearm owners do, Justin Trudeau has proven himself to be very inflexible over time, his ego often getting in the way of backing away from unpopular public policy.

Still, now that the Liberals are polling well beneath the Conservatives in recent nationwide polls of Canadian voters, gun owners may be able to exert the pressure they need to get the Liberals to back off their anti-gun pro-criminal agenda or else be routed by the Conservatives in 2025 or sooner. 

Wyatt Claypool

Wyatt is a student at Mount Royal University, where he is the president of its Campus Conservative club. In his writing, he focuses on covering provincial and federal politics, firearms regulation, and the energy sector. Wyatt has also previously written for The Post Millennial.

One response to “Shootings Spike As Liberals Target Gun Owners And Not Criminals”

  1. TERRY Sobkowich says:

    Sounds like a liberal policy aimed at looking like they are doing something rather than actually doing something.