Our Gun-Owning Neighbors To The North Are In For It

The Liberal Party headed by political legacy Justin Trudeau just ousted the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in nationwide elections yesterday. The Liberal Party took 184 seats out of 338 which gives them a working majority. They will not have to try and form a coalition government with other smaller parties. The Conservatives retain only 99 seats or 29% of the seats in the Canadian Parliament's House of Commons.

So what does that mean for Canadian gun owners? First, let's remember that the Conservative government under Stephen Harper did away with the ineffective and outrageously expensive gun registry. Second, there is this from the Liberal Party platform:

We will take action to get handguns and assault weapons off our streets.

Over the last decade, Stephen Harper has steadily weakened our gun laws in ways that make Canadians more vulnerable and communities more dangerous.

We will take pragmatic action to make it harder for criminals to get, and use, handguns and assault weapons. We will:

• repeal changes made by Bill C-42 that allow restricted and prohibited weapons to be freely transported without a permit, and we will put decision-making about weapons restrictions back in the hands of police, not politicians;
• provide $100 million each year to the provinces and territories to support guns and gangs police task forces to take illegal guns off our streets and reduce gang violence;
• modify the membership of the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee to include knowledgeable law enforcement officers, public health advocates, representatives from women’s groups, and members of the legal community;
• require enhanced background checks for anyone seeking to purchase a handgun or other restricted firearm;
• require purchasers of firearms to show a license when they buy a gun, and require all sellers of firearms to confirm that the license is valid before completing the sale;
• require firearms vendors to keep records of all firearms inventory and sales to assist police in investigating firearms trafficking and other gun crimes;
• immediately implement the imported gun marking regulations that have been repeatedly delayed by Stephen Harper; and
• as part of our investment in border infrastructure, invest in technologies to enhance our border guards’ ability to detect and halt illegal guns from the United States entering into Canada.

We will not create a new national long-gun registry to replace the one that has been dismantled.

We will ensure that Canada becomes a party to the international Arms Trade Treaty.

The only thing positive in that list is the claim that a Liberal government will not create a new long-gun registry.

I hate to say it but the next five years are not going to be good ones for Canadian gun owners. Or the rest of Canada for that matter.

Occupy Gracie Mansion

Grace Mansion for the uninitiated is the official residence of the Mayor of New York. For the last several years it has been occupied by Michael Bloomberg, billionaire, nanny stater, and gun control proponent.

Not content to attempt to impose New York City-style gun control on the rest of the nation through his Mayor Against Illegal Guns, Bloomberg is now trying to buy six State Senate seats in the commonwealth of Virginia in an effort to block gun rights reforms there.

Bloomberg (I) has donated $25,000 of his own money to six Senate Democratic candidates, who are involved in some of the closest races in the state: Sen. Toddy Puller (Fairfax), Sen. Dave Marsden (Fairfax), Sen. George Barker (Prince William), Sen. Mark Herring (Loudoun), Sen. John Miller (Newport News) and Barbara Favola, who is running for an open seat in Arlington.

As noted in The Gothamist, not everyone is happy about Bloomberg's meddling in their state.

When reached for comment on his donations, a manager at A&P Arms in Hampton, Virginia told a Daily News reporter, "He's an arrogant bastard who shouldn't be meddling." This man will have his chance to tell Bloomberg what he thinks in person: the mayor plans to visit Virginia next week.

John Feinblatt, the mayor's Criminal Justice Coordinator, is blunt about what they are trying to do.

The state Senate, controlled by Democrats 22-18, has blocked the passage of those bills (repeal of one gun a month and campus carry) - but the party's hold on power is tenuous.

If these six would lose, the laws (gun rights bills) would sail through, said Feinblatt. A bad situation would get even worse.

The South saw its share of carpetbaggers and scalawags during Reconstruction. It looks like Mayor Bloomberg wants to go back to that era - at least when it comes to Virginia and gun control.

Clayton Cramer on the Lessons of McDonald v. Chicago

Clayton Cramer, historian and Second Amendment advocate, finds two essential lessons in the McDonald decision. The lessons he finds do not come from the decision itself but rather from the events necessary to build a majority that would find for the Second Amendment and from a body of both legal and historical scholarship used to support that decision.

The first lesson is that elections have consequences. He notes that the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and then the reelection in 2004 allowed Bush to appoint Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito to the Court.

Does anyone seriously think that President Gore’s appointments to the Supreme Court would have been part of 5-4 majorities in support of the Second Amendment? No matter how strong the arguments, Gore’s appointees would simply not have considered the Second Amendment an individual right.

The second lesson is that conservative scholarly research and support for it is just as important.

Scholarly research is important; even justices that are sympathetic to our perspective needed something to point to as evidence in support of the individual right. Quite a number of us have been researching the history of the right to arms for many years now, and the results of our work provided something that the justices could support without embarrassment.

Both are necessary. Winning presidential elections means sympathetic justices, and scholarly research means arguments that stand up well at oral arguments and in decisions. You can’t do just one and expect victory. You have to do both.

Unlike winning elections, building support for conservative social, legal, and historical research is a long-term proposition. If we don't start to support these scholars now, it may just be too late.