The Rebel : Lawton Online
Apr 21, 2016
Andrew chats with the Canadian Shooting Sports Association's Tony Bernardo about a Liberal Senator's gun bill that could spell disaster for Canadian gun owners
It's an hour long show, Tony starts around 4:30 (mm:ss) in, and chats for a little over 10 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1hN3TbFUY
Tony said "Someone's done a put a lot of work into this thing. I don't think it will die easily. 76 pages that re-writes the entire Firearms Act."
"The only thing that is not circumscribed (restricted) is everything that was restricted, and everything else that's in the country. The only firearms that are not are hunting firearms, and those are confined to smooth bore firearms that are not semi-automatic that have a barrel longer than 18.5". In otherwords a full length shotgun, and 22 semi-auto rifles. Everything else is circumscribed. ... of the approximately 10 million firearms in Canada, this would restrict over 8 million of them."
"The real hazard of this bill is central storage. There are 2000 gun clubs coast to coast. That means each one of these clubs would have to host 4000 firearms. I don't know of a single gun club in Canada that could do that. The alternative is if you don't store them at a club, you have to turn them into the federal government for destruction. Because you have an alternative, they don't have to pay you compensation for the thousands of dollars of privately owned property they are going to destroy."
Tony says "Gun crime has been going steadily down in Canada since the early 1970s. Even when the gun registry was eliminated it continued its drop, proportionally, it didn't change a bit, it's a steady decline in gun crime in Canada. The gun registry made no difference to anything, but that's what we said for decades."
Hunting Rifle definition by feds "They're the ones that get to decide what a hunting gun is. This comes from a US failed gun control measure back in I think the 60s and it was 'the sporting purposes test'. The Brits picked it up too, and now the british law is based on 'the sporting purposes test'. So if you're in England and you want to buy a rifle for deer hunting, they will allow you one rifle for the purposes of deer hunting. If you say you want a second one to go to Africa to chase an elephant around, they say 'well you have to prove why you need to do that', and if they give you the firearm they refuse to give you the ammunition because there's no elephants in England. You would have to get the ammunition in Africa when you got there."
"We're a free society and our wants are not generated by needs, they're generated by desire. If I have the money and I can afford it, I should be able to buy anything I want, as long as it hurts no one else. And clearly, Canadian Firearms Owners aren't hurting other people!"
"Our entire gun control law system is generated by evoking feelings. It has nothing to do with reality. The AR15 is simply a black ugly expensive rifle. It's just a rifle. And in Canada we have magazine restrictions, it's just a 5 shot semi-automatic rifle. Nothing more than that, but we have an entire Hollywood industry that is set upon generating emotional values to inanimate objects. And you notice it in the movie whenever the bad guy reaches for his gun and the music changes, and its now scary and ominous. They're generating this. They're evoking emotion on simple inanimate objects. It's crazy this has happened. What a way to run a railroad."
"Absolutely zero consultation [with CSSA] and the firearms advisory committee was dissolved on the 31st of Dec 2015. Largest firearms group in Canada and we have no seat at the table."
"We really don't know. We're not hearing anything coming up in Ottawa. I'm up in Ottawa pretty regularly. I'm talking to people all the time up there. Nobody's hearing anything about anything. This Bill, came out of the Senate, there was no knowledge this was coming, other than the fact that the good senator has put it forth three other times before, and it failed every time. There are some interesting dynamics happening up there around firearms issues. First of all the UN Firearms Marking System which will do literally hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to the Canadian Firearms industry, the lawful firearms industry. That's coming up like a freight train, and it's due to implement in a little over a year. And there's been zero communication with the government on it. Not because we don't try. There's stuff going from our office every single week. We have not had the decency of one single response. Nothing. Might as well be sending it to Mars. Apparently the two million licenced Canadian firearms owners in this country, don't matter. Their concerns don't matter."
"[One of the largest blocks of Canadians I'm aware of] Absolutely. The only larger block are fishermen. There are more Canadians that use sporting firearms than there are that play hockey. There are more Canadians that use firearms than play golf. And apparently our concerns are completely irrelevant to the government of Canada right now. That is shameful beyond anything you could imagine. We're not a tiny little minority of people. We're a very large minority."
Is it over?
