Canada Aims to Force Owners of 'Military-Style Assault Weapons' to Turn Them In
Source: New York Times
OTTAWA — Most owners of what Canada calls “military-style assault weapons” would be required to turn over their firearms to a government buyback program under legislation introduced on Monday, which would tighten the country’s already stringent control of firearms. The Canadian government also immediately imposed new regulations banning the sale, purchase, importation or transfer of handguns. “As a government, as a society, we have a responsibility to act to prevent more tragedies,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters on Monday.
The proposed buyback law is the latest in a series of steps Mr. Trudeau has taken to restrict firearms since 22 people were killed in rural Nova Scotia by a gunman in 2020, in the deadliest rampage in the country’s history. The gunman was killed by police. The Canadian legislation comes as another mass shooting in the United States has reignited an often searing debate on gun violence. Last week a gunman used a military-style rifle to kill 19 children and two teachers in the town of Uvalde, Tex.
Only 10 days earlier, a teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black. After 20 children and six adults were massacred in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, there were widespread calls in the United States for stronger controls on powerful firearms. But in the intervening years almost nothing has happened, with many Republicans aligned with the gun lobby refusing to even allow a vote on any proposed legislation.
Mr. Trudeau’s program echoes a semiautomatic weapons ban and buyback program launched by New Zealand in 2019, after a lone gunman stormed two mosques, killing 51 people and injuring dozens of others in Christchurch. After a mass shooting in 1996 in which a gunman killed 35 people in the town of Port Arthur, Australia, the government there collected more than 650,000 semiautomatic rifles and many shotguns after they were banned under new legislation. American lawmakers have failed to restore restrictions on military-style semiautomatic weapons that expired in 2004. But Mr. Trudeau’s proposal, which could apply to tens of thousands of firearms, is expected to pass.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/world/canada/canada-gun-buyback.html
Man... wish we could do that here but... FREEDOMS (unless you are a woman and/or a POC).
= new reply since forum marked as read
We cry "do something," and our neighbor to the north does it. 
begathons to continue. 
But then once Canada got serious, they made mincemeat outta them and then the story fell out of the news cycle.
But then I just found this from a couple weeks ago -
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the protest as illegal. Now some of his key opponents are embracing it.
By Ian Austen
May 11, 2022
OTTAWA — Canadians were shocked when a group of truckers rolled their rigs into the nation’s capital earlier this year, paralyzed the downtown area for weeks and demanded that the government lift all pandemic-related restrictions. The demonstrations spread to border crossings, forcing car manufacturing plants to shut down and disrupting billions of dollars in trade with the United States. In the end, the prime minister took the extraordinary step of invoking an emergencies act allowing the government, among other things, to freeze protesters’ bank accounts. But that was then.
Now, the truckers and their supporters have become an important constituency and are being courted by the country’s Conservative Party, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s main political opposition. Many in the party are busy rewriting what happened on those chaotic days in February, glossing over the blockades’ illegality and an arms cache found at a protest in Alberta where the authorities said protesters were ready to use violence to block a border crossing there. And several would-be Conservative leaders are fighting each other to be seen as the true defender of the truckers and their claims that Canadians have lost their freedoms.
“The truckers have more integrity in their pinky finger than you had in your entire scandal-plagued cabinet,” said Pierre Poilievre, the front-runner for the now vacant party leadership as he challenged a former Quebec premier, Jean Charest, in a debate last week. With its multiparty system, Canada is not known for the kind of zero-sum politics that has come to define political life in the United States. But that is a narrative that obscures the struggles and intrigue that animates the contest for power in the country. That is especially true after the last elections in October, when Mr. Trudeau was returned to power for a third term as prime minister, with the far right party again failing to take any seats in the parliament.
The Conservatives, the only other party to form a government in Canada, are readying for a fight and see the truckers and their followers not as outcasts, but as political currency that can bring in votes — and money. “We should support our truckers and stand up for their freedoms,” Mr. Poilievre said at a recent rally in Ottawa. Canada’s next federal election is expected in 2025, which in the world of politics is an eternity. Anything can happen between now and then. But there are two factors that have unnerved some of those close to the current Liberal Party government.
(snip)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/world/canada/trucker-convoy-protest-conservatives.html
Looks like someone is already working on the next round of astroturf manufacturing.
Take care. 
Otherwise, such a threat to our religious beliefs might lead to a movement to repeal the Second Amendment. Quick, everyone arm up and head north, except for Ted Cruz, who will, of course, head to Cancun.
'Cause some people just can't tell.
💙💛
(almost 5500 miles/8900 km), which is way more than anything that Mexico would need from their end.
Maybe one of those deer fences.
