BELLEVUE, WA – Canadian gun owners just sent their government a message that may be lost on the country’s leftist Liberal politicians, but is crystal clear to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
According to the National Post, the federal government confirmed that only 25 firearms were turned in as part of a “test run” on the buyback which was aimed at collecting 200 banned guns, amounting to only about 12 percent of what they expected. Firearms which were surrendered, the report said, were destroyed. The same report noted how, since 2020, more than 2,500 makes and models of firearms have been banned because government bureaucrats decided they are “assault-style” guns “unfit for public use.”
“It looks like Canadian gun owners are having none of this buyback foolishness, at least for the time being,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Now Canadian officials are claiming the pilot program merely needs to be clarified, and that more instructions are necessary to ‘facilitate participation.’ They’re trying to put a happy face on a clearly sad effort to disarm the nation’s law-abiding gun owners.”
The report says an official with the Canadian Coalition of Firearm Rights considers the government’s buyback program to be “logistically impossible.”
“No matter how the Canadian government portrays this outrage,” Gottlieb observed, “it amounts to compensated confiscation. Citizens are required to turn in their banned firearms and get a check from the government, or they could face legal consequences. The Canadians call this a ‘buyback,’ but the government never owned those guns in the first place. The term creates a false impression that fundamental rights come from government, and can be rescinded essentially on a whim.
“Nonsense like this,” he stated, “underscores the importance of our Second Amendment here in the United States, and all of the right-to-bear-arms provisions in a majority of state constitutions. Truly free people should never be required to surrender their arms, no matter how much money the government offers in compensation, because it reduces a right to the level of a government regulated privilege. Fundamental rights, whether specifically delineated in a constitution or not, can never be for sale at any price. Our fellow gun owners north of the border obviously understand this by not participating in the test run. If the government in Ottawa doesn’t see what happened, they are deaf, dumb and blind.”