The Liberal government in Canada is continuing its nationwide gun “buyback” of banned firearms, though we haven’t heard many Liberal politicians touting its success as of late.
Instead, most of the recent headlines about the compensated confiscation effort have centered around localities refusing to participate. Most recently, the police department in Kingston, Ontario declared it won’t be involved in the federal effort, citing “concerns related to the program’s design, implementation, and potential impacts on local policing resources and public safety priorities,” identified by both the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police.
The “buyback” is off to such a rough start that even CNN is reporting on the criticism, though its report studiously avoids calling the effort a failure.
In January, Canada began implementing one of those reforms: a long-awaited, hotly debated program to compensate the country’s gun owners for their now-banned firearms. Yet the buyback program has suffered yearslong delays and pushback from police, provincial officials and gun owners.
In September, audio emerged of Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree, the official responsible for implementing the legislation, questioning the ability of police departments to enforce the buyback. Anandasangaree later said the recording was made without his knowledge, and said the comments were “misguided.”
Complicating the buyback is the fact that Canada has plenty of guns, more than the program alone can collect. The federal government estimates that it has the funds to buy 136,000 firearms, but Canada has roughly 2 million registered and 10 million unregistered guns, according to a 2017 release from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research group based in Switzerland.
Now, not all of those firearms have been banned by the Canadian government, at least not yet. But it is fair to say that the Liberals have been targeting the country’s legal gun owners, while the vast majority the country’s gun-involved crime is committed by individuals who’ve acquired their guns through illicit means. I doubt many violent offenders, gang members, and drug dealers are going to participate in the compensated confiscation efforts.
A number of provinces have declined to participate as well, though the Liberal government is still talking tough about collecting firearms in those locations.
Hellbound and Down 