damnitman wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2020 12:05 pm...
The rub is is that if you decided to hang onto a banned weapon, you are risking your freedom for a piece that you could never take out and shoot without fear of being caught....
There's much discussion about that in the Canadian forums.
Of the firearms on the new prohib list,
only the AR category and one or two others (with barrels shorter than 18.6") were previously "restricted" (meaning they are on a central registry). the remaining ones - approximately 80% of the guns named in the order - were previously "non-restricted", meaning they never required registration and no notification is required to buy/sell/transfer them between private parties.
In other words, the government has no idea who specifically owns them, where they are, or even how many there are.
The consensus among affected gun owners is to simply not admit they have them, and just wait until the next conservative government takes power, as they have promised to reverse this order if judicial measures fail. Yes, leaving your Mini-14 or your Storm in your safe (or buried under the shed) for maybe years sucks, but not as much as surrendering it for pennies on the dollar knowing you will
never get it back. The registered ones? Yeah, kiss those goodbye. The unregistered ones?
What unregistered ones?
The reason "grandfathering" suddenly disappeared from any press releases is because thew antigun coalition has already complained that these measures don't go far enough, and that subsequent governments may reverse the ban. They have the ear of our moron Prime Minister, but not with most elected officials as a whole. Once he's gone back to teaching drama in blackface and groping ski-bunnies, they cease to be anywhere as influential as they are now.
There's also the reality that the RCMP - who enforce firearms laws - are woefully incompetent. As someone who had to assist RCMP members confiscate guns as evidence (when I was an MP), my personal feeling is they will never actually get around to enforcing this en masse. They simply don't have the resources (and in some cases, the intelligence). And, as many of those Mounties are personally affected by the ban themselves, I don't sense they will be prioritizing this enforcement on their "to do" lists. One of my Mountie friends is a high-level 3-gun guy. He told me he has $40k worth of suddenly-prohibited guns and parts in his safe. He's in no hurry to enforce this, and he's not alone.