Everyone finds the recent Nova Scotia shooting disturbing and tragic, but we should all also really find the new ‘Assault-Style’ weapons ban disturbing, although for different reasons.

Even if you were in favour of fewer gun rights or wanted more, reasonable people reading the new ‘Assault-Style’ weapons ban should have some alarms going off because it’s seriously badly written, illogical on different levels, and is overall blatantly contradictory. 

Here are four reasons proving my point:

#1: The ban doesn’t address the greatest concern highlighted by the Nova Scotia shooting: blackmarket firearms

It’s now clear the Nova Scotia shooter illegally obtained most of his firearms from the United States and the then-current Canadian firearms laws functioned correctly and didn’t need rewriting, i.e. the shooter was correctly identified as a menace to society.

However, the glaring issue of Blackmarket firearms made obvious by the shooting remains unaddressed by Trudeau’s Liberals. 

The threats of illegal gun trafficking and homemade/semi-homemade weapons in Canada have been growing for years, and if the government had responded to the recent shooting by confronting the Blackmarket firearms trade, I’d be completely on board.

Instead, all we got was a ban restricting legal firearms, which will do nothing to stop the next Nova Scotia-type mass killing; again, because most of the shooter’s guns were illegally obtained. This fact alone makes the idea of banning weapons to address the Nova Scotia killings idiotic.

#2: It prohibits bolt-action rifles and some shotguns; hunting weapons, not ‘Assault-Style’ weapons 

The Honourable Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair recently claimed the new ban doesn’t prohibit 10-12 gauge shotguns, but this is incorrect. 

While not banning all shotguns, it does prohibit firearms with a 20mm+ bore and for you gun-illiterates (I include myself in that group), the bore is the interior diameter of a gun’s barrel. 

Many 10-12 gauge shotguns made for hunting do indeed have a bore of 20+mm, so the ban effectively makes these illegal and the Honourable Mr. Blair is incorrect to state otherwise.

Also banned are a number of bolt-action rifles, again, for the understanding of gun-noobs, bolt-action guns must be reloaded after each firing, with no self-loading capability.

One of the more ridiculous parts of the new ban is that this term: ‘assault weapon/rifle’ has no established legal definition, making it slippery to codify in law, although loose characteristics people have in mind when they think of ‘Assault’ rifles is self-loading/feeding, and capable of semi/full-automatic fire. 

Bolt-action rifles and shotguns have neither of these capabilities, so why are they in the ‘Assault-Style’ weapons ban? The answer is the ban was badly thought out and is dumb.

#3: It doesn’t completely ban ‘Assault-Style’ rifles 

In justifying the ban, PM Trudeau said there’s  “no use and no place for such weapons in Canadian society,” but the ban actually excludes numerous ‘assault-style/military-grade assault rifles,’ and some of these models are popular in Canada.

Is there anything dumber or more symbolic of a failed law than one that doesn’t accomplish what it says it does? Because that’s this ban. It is all for the appearance of being ‘woke’ on gun control by mass banning a large sounding number of rifles, and on top of not making Canadians any more safe, it doesn’t even make sense from a gun control perspective.

#4: It was made law without parliamentary review, and reads like it

Trudeau didn’t follow the normal parliamentary process when he made the ban into law, instead of using the Order in Council method.

Trudeau currently heads a minority government, so he doesn’t have the mandate to magnanimously make laws. The only reason he got away with it this time is that parliament has been temporarily disbanded due to COVID-19.

But why is this point on a list of dumb things about the gun ban though? Isn’t this a legal/parliamentary procedure issue?  Well, there was actually a good reason Trudeau’s Liberals should’ve brought the ban before Parliament. 

One benefit of having a Parliamentary democracy is the debating process: where new laws get vetted by representatives and combed meticulously for errors, and the Liberals would have benefitted from that process here. The ban is confusing, horribly written, and edited. It wasn’t just amoral for Trudeau to dodge the democratic process – it was also dumb. 

We are still today trying to figure out what is and is not banned as the RCMP have released statements attempting to clarify why certain firearms were banned based on increasingly arbitrary details in the designs of individual firearms. 

All this confusion and needless expense for something that accomplishes nothing. Sounds dumb to me.