Guess I missed it. Of course, I do occasionally wander off to do some work, and even to get some sleep. Maybe even watch a little teevee.
1) From what I read on the Canadian Firearms Registry website,
(http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/en/owners_users/fact_sheets/will.asp) certain types of handguns are now banned for sale/registration in Canada. Current owners of those banned handguns are placed in a distinctly licensed class that is allowed to keep them or transfer them only to other members of that special class.The change from the previous situation is really very slight. You might want to look into it.
Your society has certain beliefs and values that mine doesn't have.
Beliefs: We don't believe -- as a matter of fact, that is, our conclusion from the facts known to us -- that individual possession of firearms is necessary, or desirable, for "self-defence". We don't believe -- as a matter of fact -- that the government is coming to get us; we actually know that it isn't. For instance.
Values: We don't place our own convenience or pleasure, or even rights and freedoms, above the interests of other people and our communities to nearly the extent that it seems that large numbers of USAmericans do.
I pass no judgment. I simply state the facts. They're fairly obvious to anyone who observes.
Based on our knowledge of facts and our values, we have agreed that private handgun possession is undesirable, and taken steps to minimize it. Our country, our choice.
There is not the slightest move afoot to remove long arms from private possession. None. None whatsoever. Canada has close to the same rural/urban proportions in our population as the US, and a much more widely dispersed population. Hunting is an essential part of the economy -- both in the hunting-for-food sense, and in the tourist dollars sense. Protection of people and animals from predators, and crops from vermin, is also essential. And the First Nations people have a pretty absolutely ironclad constitutional right to hunt.
I have known hunters, when I lived in a small town for a few months, many years ago. Drunken lawyers, the ones I knew, for the most part. I think the one I was closest to still had guns and still hunted, even after his depressed, disabled 13-year-old son killed himself with one of them.
And I'm sure they've all registered their firearms as they are now required to do. Without the slightest fear that anybody's going to come prying them from their warm hands, unless of course they decide to threaten their wife or leave them lying around in the back seat of the car or some such. I can only hope that they actually comply with the safe storage regulations, so no one else's kid lays hands on them in a fit of despair, or annoyance with a teacher, or whatever.
Your regulation --> confiscation scenario is just as much nonsense in Canada as it was when you first stated it.
You said:
the threat of "eventual" firearms confiscation as in CAN or the UKAnd the fact is that there is NO such "threat" in Canada, "eventual" or otherwise, in respect of firearms that are used for purposes that are acceptable in a civilized society. There just isn't any "right" to own whatever one wants to own, for whatever purpose one wants, that is not subject to justifiable limitation.
The limitation that has been agreed to in Canada -- that was imposed by a democratically elected government, with the overwhelming support of the population (and, in the case of handguns, the near-unanimous support of the population that is affected: urban-dwellers) -- appears to meet the "justification" standard. That's a standard that is developed, and applied,
by a society. In this case, mine. When the society meets the threshold requirements for recognition as one in which individual rights and freedoms are respected, there are variations possible depending on the society's needs and the priorities it adopts. I recognize this; you apparently do not. Other societies recognize this. Yours is less prone to recognizing it.
And the fact is also that the decision of the people of the UK that banned private possession,
in circumstances that are not remotely comparable to Canadian or USAmerican circumstances, was their decision.
(I mean really, all these questions about hunting on public land in the UK. Anybody got any clue about geography? All those pristine forests and waving grassland prairies just outside their back doors, uninhabited miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, all over the tiny UK, all those lions and tigers and bears wandering the moors waiting to be bagged by mighty hunters who manage to avoid the hikers also using all that public land. There are over 60,000,000 people in an area roughly equivalent to Nebraska ...)
Perhaps you, like some others, really do think that there are not things like elections and courts in the UK, and that the gummint there just does as it pleases and rights & freedoms be damned. I've tried to provide educational assistance in this respect -- the UK
Human Rights Act, 1998, the
European Convention on Human Rights by which the UK government is bound -- but you seem not to have paid attention.
*You* can go right ahead claiming that banning private possession of firearms is an unjustifiable intereference with the exercise of some right or other
in the United Kingdom. Millions and millions and millions of people, like the ones actually affected by it, don't agree with you. Some people might find that fact worth considering, given that there really hasn't been a Big Book of Rights published or discovered, to date, in which we can look up "guns" in the index and find what the universal correct answer is. There can indeed be differences of opinion about what is a
justifiable interference with the exercise of a right, and you're welcome to yours about what is justifiable in the UK. It just doesn't have much to do with anything, when the UK is not governed by a rights-violating tyrannical dictatorship and the people of the UK don't share your opinion.
The CAN government's statement that it isn't confiscating weapons now (can't find the link) doesn't address the plan to confiscate firearms in the future. And the CAN govt knows which firearms to confiscate, and the people to confiscate them from, through the licensing/registration scheme.And you just can't imagine what a raving lunatic the huge, overwhelming, vast majority of Canadians (i.e. those who are not themselves raving lunatics) knows that someone would have to be, to say such a thing. Well, either a raving lunatic or an ethnocentric and extemely uninformed person.
"I didn't make the argument up about fear of armed people in public "going nuts" - it's on the Brady website (http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/issuebriefs/ccw.asp):
Do you feel safer sitting next to someone carrying a gun?
There is no context for that statement, other than repeating the complaint about possible inadequate training requirements before the CCW is issued: ...What you had actually said was this:
"The Brady Campaign pushes licensing while demonizing CCW. If the licensing regime distinguishes legal/illegal ownership, why shouldn't a license issued under that system double as a CCW? A license holder would already be vetted as a "legal" firearms owner accountable to the government. What's the difference if that owner keeps the firearm at home? If he/she were going to go nuts, lack of CCW-priveleges won't stop him/her from walking out their front doors."I asked this:
What benefit is gained, ever, by representing the opposing view as something that it isn't when you know, or must surely be presumed to know, that it isn't ... and then knocking it over?I asked it because you know, or must be presumed to know, that (a) no one here is "the Brady Campaign", and (b) the Brady Campaign (I guess with some confidence) has a whole lot more to say than what you quoted. You "represented the opposing view as something that it isn't" by representing it
only partially. An elephant is not a trunk or an ear or a foot, and opposition to the carrying of concealed weapons is not irrational fear of people going nuts with firearms in public. Sums of parts, and all that. As I said:
The danger from people <promenading around in public with concealed firearms> does not arise exclusively or even in the main from the possibility of "his/her going nuts", despite your apparent intense wish to represent the reasons for opposing such promenading as being based on that possibility and that possibility alone.Which is what you did do.
You have now paraphrased and purportedly refuted other Brady Campaign objections. They were not the subject of your post, or of my comment on it.
The decisions made by USAmericans in this matter are not directly my business, and I'm not going to get dragged into the substantive debate. I'm quite happy, and quite entitled, to sit on this side of the border and say you're all nuts, if that's what I feel like doing. But I actually don't, because I recognize that I'm looking at a society that knows things that are different from what I/we know, and holds values that are different from my/our values.
I do from time to time feel like questioning that "knowledge" (e.g. the usefulness of personal firearms for things they are represented as being necessary for, the impracticality of reducing their dangerousness, etc.) and even questioning those values. But to the extent that the knowledge is valid (which I can't really assess in some instances) and the values aren't my business, you folks can just go ahead and have a picnic; I'm sure the handguns come in handy for marauding ants.
Now ... what you didn't do was answer my questions.
Let's just try asking it the other way around. What does having a right/licence to own something have to do with having a right/licence to promenade around in public with it?
... Can you maybe think of other things that people have a right to own, where the manner and place in which they use those things might be (is) justifiably restricted?
Has anyone established yet what the cost of issuing such licences is ... and resolved the controversy over who should properly bear whatever those costs are?What's that I hear? Crickets?
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