Will Anti-Gun Democrats Try To Follow in Canadian Leader’s Footsteps?

Prime Minister Trudeau is proposing a “freeze on national handgun ownership” in Canada, a potential forewarning of anti-gun measures that some Democrats would like to pursue in America.Mr. Trudeau is acting in response to the recent mass shootings at Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, according to NPR. The rhetoric of American politicians, including President Biden, suggests that they would be open to similar measures in America absent the protections offered by the Constitution’s Second Amendment.The Canadian proposal would impose a moratorium on the sale, purchase, transfer, or import of handguns. “There is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives,” Mr. Trudeau said Monday. Canadian officials are also planning a mandatory buyback of 1,500 types of firearms at the end of the year. Citizens would be legally required to turn over guns to the government for financial compensation.“The dystopian future Trudeau is manifesting in Canada is coming to America if US citizens don’t get involved,” Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican of Kentucky, tweeted Monday.“Trudeau is exploiting a tragedy in another country to once again attack peaceful gun owners in Canada,” a tweet by the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, read. “Like all tyrants, he wants to completely disarm citizens.”Mr. Trudeau’s anti-gun rhetoric has been echoed by some American Democrats, who are calling for the return of a federal ban on so-called assault weapons — though the White House on Tuesday rejected the idea of a handgun sales ban like Canada’s here.“A .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out, may be able to get it, and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body,” Mr. Biden said during a recent speech in Uvalde.“So the idea of these high-caliber weapons is of — there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection, hunting. I mean, I just — and remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute,” Mr. Biden said Monday. “You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons.”Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat of Rhode Island, introduced in March a bill that would make it a crime to “knowingly import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess” a semiautomatic weapon. The chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal, sponsored the bill and on Monday tweeted, “Legislation like this cannot wait. There is no reason why the average person should be able to walk into a store and buy an AR-15. Period.”Senator Sanders tweeted on Friday: “No one needs an AR-15 or any other assault weapon designed to massacre people. When we had an assault weapons ban from 1994-2004, mass shootings went down 43%. After it expired, mass shootings tripled. End the filibuster. Ban assault weapons.”Mr. Biden credited the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, in place between 1994 and 2004, with a decrease in firearm-related deaths, referring to the law as “rational action” that “cut down mass murders.”A 2004 assessment of the ban by a professor at George Mason University, Christopher Koper, found that its effects were “likely to be small at best,” noting that “assault weapons” were “rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”However, a 2021 study by Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine estimated that the ban prevented 10 public mass shootings while in place, and could have prevented 30 more if it remained in place after 2004.Mr. Biden has stated that it is up to the Democrat-controlled Congress to pass legislation banning certain firearms, according to the Hill. “I can’t dictate this stuff. I can do the things that I’ve done. And any executive action I can take, I’ll continue to take. But I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t, you know, change the background checks. I can’t do that,” Mr. Biden said Monday.

Will Anti-Gun Democrats Try To Follow in Canadian Leader’s Footsteps?

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