72 Comments

Excellent article. It was really frustrating to see what was happening in BC, along with a noticeable reluctance by some media to fact check or challenge what was being said.

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Very few in the media have the slightest idea about firearms. That's what first got me to notice Matt Gurney years ago, when he was just a young guy. He totally knew his shit about firearms.

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True story…..including his knowledge on defence.

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Thank you Tim,great article. My dad and uncle went to Ottawa to join the protest against the Liberals first Gun Registery. I was impressed,and he was only a part time hunter. 35 years he worked for Lands and Forests(Natural Resiurces) and taught his 6 boys to enjoy and respect Canadas great outdoors(environment). Today,after taking all the required training,courses,certifications because my dad told me it’s the right thing to do(Game Warden,then Manager),I still am left feeling like a criminal buying a box of .410 shells. Because the wife enjoys going for walks in the fall and maybe bringing home supper seeing a Grouse. It was always like a right of passage,for me,my son,his daughter. This group of Liberals have written such a bad piece of policy that I don’t even know which one of my firearms are illegal. Like many of the men and women in Alberta,we are law abiding citizens who followed ‘all’ the rules.

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Thank you, Tim Thurley, for this excellent article. The ridiculous Liberal gun laws with their made up “assault-style” category, their misleading nonsense about handguns, and their sneaky add-in of so many guns after the passing of the Bill, fits well with the Eby gang’s lies about what the B.C. Conservatives’ position is. Eby is merely a taller, younger Trudeau who will say and do whatever it takes to retain power. The B.C. NDP have been lying to us, with impunity, about a number of things for some years now just as have the federal Lib/Dips. They are a truth-deficient lot with poor governance records who find it necessary to lie about their opponents and turn whatever they can into a divisive wedge. Thanks again for doing the fact check that the NDP cheerleading BC media should have done.

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“Eby is merely a taller, younger Trudeau who will say and do whatever it takes to retain power.” I thought exactly the same thing … a doppelgänger.

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This column only reinforces something that has been true for some time: that the biggest purveyors of disinformation and misinformation in this country are the federal and provincial governments. If we are to legislate restrictions in this area, they should apply more to them than anyone else.

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Yes, this is an excellent article, thank you Tim.

If Eby and his 'crew' lied about this, what else did they lie about during the election? We the public know he 'flip flops' on a few matters depending on voters - e.g. voluntary treatment for addiction to involuntary (remains to be seen if he will flip back) - how can he be trusted to 'do better'? But then what does 'do better' actually mean? It likely does not include: "reasonable laws require reasonable discussion by reasonable people".

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Yes, this is exactly the point at which I formed a very negative opinion about Eby. What people seem to forget is that there are a lot of legal firearms owners in BC (and in Canada in general). And every one of those people has friends and family who don't want to see them unfairly maligned. Those people vote too. As crime increases, I see more and more people coming out against cracking down on legal gun owners.

Also, the way Trudeau did the OIC on this gun grab was ridiculously opportunistic. He was practically frothing at the mouth over his good fortune of having a mass murder upon which he could implement his dream legislation. It was absolutely horrible to watch him do that.

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And you will recall that the RCMP Commissioner of the day (what’s-er-name) was complicit in the exploitation. Disgusting lot!

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Yup. Absolutely appalling.

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The Party Police

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I hate the gun control debate in Canada. Hate hate hate it. Look, I’m the target of the Liberals and NDP here. I live in Toronto, pretty close to downtown (about as far from Yonge and King as Matt Gurney does). Have never owned a gun and never intend to. Can count on one hand the times I’ve ever even been to a shooting range in my life (once at a team-building event in Texas that involved AK-47s and AR-15s, yikes). The American ideal of everyone being armed for self-defence horrifies me and I’m glad we don’t have that tradition in Canada. I should be a Liberal supporter on this!

But then you look at where the ACTUAL problem is. It’s overwhelmingly smuggled guns from the US, either through border-straddling First Nations or in modified trunks of cars driven up from Buffalo. And they’re used for street crime, and that’s what I’m scared of. The Danforth shooter — very close to my home and terrifying for me — had an illegal smuggled gun from the US. The gang shootings where people die in crossfire are all smuggled US guns. Legal gun owners in Canada, to a pretty good approximation, have ZERO to do with gun deaths or gun crime.

The moment we decided that policing smuggling through Akwesasne was too politically difficult to be worth the saved lives from gun crime, is the moment they lost me.

I have no interest in a useless, divisive culture war. I have nothing against rural gun owners hunting (and I’m even sympathetic to rural folks having them for home defence, though far more conflicted there, and recognize that my emotions as a dad affect me here).

We do have a real gun violence problem in Canada and I would love if we could have a reality-based conversation about how to solve it.

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When you can’t campaign on policy or your record, desperation and lies take over. Just wait to see what the Federal Liberals come up with.

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While this review is an excellent logical overview, like 99% of such discussions it fails to recognize that the whole Canadian disarmament initiative is based on emotion which trumps logic 100% of the time - as any politician and/or conman(person) knows full well. Using logic you will never convince the Rosedale Karen’s of all sexes or the Montreal bourgeois who were alive when Gamil Gharbi was achieving martyrdom for Allah at the Ecole Polytechnique almost a generation ago.

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I think the Poly folk are as opportunistic as Trudeau. They probably rejoiced upon hearing the news of the latest mass murder. Until then, we could say, "mass murders are so rare in Canada that for almost 40 years we've been commemorating the very same one annually." And that quote still pretty much holds true.

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Agree 100%. And it’s amazing how the Libs were able to virtually instantly ban some 1500 rifles as soon as the Nova Scotia denturist shooter did his deed. The sense of relief from pent-up anticipation among bureaucrats, certain politicians and professional hoplophobes must have been positively orgasmic.

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> Using logic you will never convince the Rosedale Karen’s of all sexes

Neither will you convince anyone with insults.

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Thanks for the facts!!

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Thanks for shooting straight on this issue.

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How do you know when a politician is lying? Their lips are moving. Of course most of the media supports lying by their reluctance to challenge favoured politicians, especially during elections.

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Both parties have their version of ideological cray-cray but that's kryptonite to the in-decline BC NDP, who rely on normalizing things like the bizarre, arbitrary, hateful settler-colonial narrative, or the idea that everyone on the street is a lost lamb, used to justify terrible policy.

If Eby couldn't award himself justification ("THEY'RE the dangerous ideologues!") how could he sleep and with a straight face change Rustad's reflection of being fully vaccinated, developing a heart murmer and saying he was sorry he had the last shot, into "they're murderous anti-vaxxers!!" I'm sure this behaviour, repeated over and over, is why Brent Chapman gets a seat despite his comments. When we see edits like the one above, it's harder to vilify Chapman, and I think the electorate sent a message the NDP will never hear.

If Eby's not a habitual liar, we need a new word for this. Eby had literally nothing else to promote himself outside his base. The results on every file are demonstrably worse, despite the NDP's determination to measure and be accountable for nothing. So he (barely) won the election by changing people's words and attacking them personally.

Such a big man. (barf)

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Mr. Eby didn't call anyone a murderous anti-vaxxer. He DID suggest that the BC Conservatives have got a lot of anti-vaxxers. ... and they do. The most notable isn't Mr. Rustad of course, it's Chris Sankey of North Coast-Haida Gwaii. He's on record either saying that the Covid causes AIDS or inventing a non-existent disease called "VAIDS", depending on how you care to interpret his words.

And when criticized, Mr. Sankey's response was to claim that his critiques are racist.

Good grief that kind of false victim mentality of "all my critics are racists" is tiresome.

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yes... well done, and misses the point entirely.

If you're not aware of Eby's creative interpretations of (literally every statement) by the Cons, fairly called lies, you're as blinkered as the comment "we have to do more" (when the electorate clearly said, "you have to do different!")

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> If you're not aware of Eby's creative interpretations

Oh I get the point... .I'm just ALSO noting the irony of you condemning his misrepresentations of Mr. Rustad, while simultaneously making up your own "creative interpretations".

This is like watching Justin Trudeau condemn misinformation.

Pot, meet kettle.

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I'll buy that... and retract the word "murderous", lol.

Nothing changes in the calculation of Eby's/NDP desperate lying to avoid discussing failure on every file. Changing Rustad's comments about 3 shots and a heart murmur to "Anti-Vaxxer!" needs a new word if lying doesn't work for you.

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Fair enough.

I just get really annoyed by the hyperbole.

Not that this is you, but we saw this with discussing the origin of the Covid outbreak.

One group of people loudly declared that anyone who said it was even possibly maybe a lab leak was a racist. And then you’ve got another side that says that it’s an ethnically targeted bio weapon against whites and blacks that is designs not to hurt Chinese or Jewish people.

It’s like people see crazy and can’t help but say “hold my beer”.

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The hyperbole IS a problem, feels like a grasping for revenge/retaliation when I'm not getting what I want. More selfishness.

(The media has not been helpful in this regard: in the worst cases using unnecessary hyperbole AND putting a thumb on the scale, a.k.a. telling us what to think.)

I'm all for "all's fair in love and war (and politics)", except I'm not. Sure, Rustad was sitting in the catbird seat... nothing is better, criticizing is the easier job, so there's plenty to work with. The BC Cons (who worry me, but less than the NDP now) took the risk of virtually no filter for candidates because, despite the dramatic changes and very short time, they must have seen the best opportunity in their lifetimes. They ended up with 44 seats, from 2.

But, the language coming from the NDP MLAs, and true-believers, was breathless, sounded unhinged and, as the result became clearly close, became even more so. It was apocalyptic, describing a dystopian future of hate and suffering under the BC Cons. (Shouting settler at me is hateful. I pick my own labels, thanks.)

Two fascinating recent studies, reported in NPR, might offer clues: 1) left-leaning voters are the unhappiest. Left-leaning, younger female voters are the unhappiest in this group because they hear from their echo-chamber the world is set against them. Left-leaning voters are the most likely group to assign a moral judgement to a political view. (There's a few examples of death and suffering at the hands of folks who held the moral "high-ground.")

My point is this...

As a centrist who believes we need everyone at the table to understand problems and make good decisions, today it looks like the right sees itself more accurately than the left. The left end is too convinced of their moral justification to notice people are understandably unhappy, must be validated (not vilified), heard (not handled), and accepted at the table as valid points of view.

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Great article with two key takeaways; "a tricky, expensive program that won't improve public safety outcomes", and, there is no longer any downside, consequences, or accountability for politicians of all stripes to spew bald face lies, and lots of them. Another Trump legacy - if you tell enough lies quickly enough, in a constant never ending torrent, from many different angles, the truth will never be able to keep up. This is not going to end well for this country.

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Trump didn't invent lying.

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True - he didn't invent a lot of disgraceful behaviours and personality disorders that he has managed to successfully monetize and hoodwink a significant percentage of the population with.

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Ummmm ... about that image ... that's a classic Model 1911 .45 ACP.

Those are the wrong bullets.

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I was looking at that too and went down a bit of a rabbit hole.

https://blog.cheaperthandirt.com/review-coonans-hard-hitting-357-magnum-1911/

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Funny enough, that actually looks like a 22lr clone of a 1911... And they're still the wrong cartridges😂

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There is no room for reasonable discussions by reasonable people in this "post-truth" era. Sorry, wish it were different.

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So you think guns are such pivotal issue, for BC….and/or Canadians? What’s the benefit — economic? Health? Security? Is America better because its citizens own many guns…is this tempest worth bringing down a government? What is the key value in gun ownership?

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Thank you for your comment and taking the time to read. A large part of my argument here is that voters as a whole did not seem to consider it a pivotal issue despite the nuclear tone of the attacks.

The remaining questions are more difficult to answer. Value is an inherently individual concept. About ~350,000 British Columbians seem to see value in maintaining a firearm licence, and we know from survey data that the reasons are diverse. Similarly, it is for voters to decide for themselves what they value and whether - and why or why not - the topic will impact their vote.

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Interestingly, I think it was a key factor in Erin O'Toole's poor election results. He pissed off gun owners in the 11th hour and they rallied against him. It's hard to say why voters vote the way they do, but the NDP performed quite poorly in this recent election, although still did better than they should have, imo. It's possible the comment affected the outcome a bit. But firearms owners are spread throughout the province, and the ones in the lower mainland straddle various ridings, so they wouldn't necessarily show up as a block of voters. AND the biggest thing: I imagine a lot of people don't really pay attention to what candidates are really saying. I think they pay more attention to what their friends and family say about what candidates are saying and what they stand for. That's a big difference, sadly.

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Mass Shootings by Country 2024

Mass Shootings by Country 2024

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-worst-mass-killing-incidents-2022-09-04/

An Analysis of Motivating Factors in 1,725 Worldwide Cases of Mass Murder Between 1900-2019 - PubMed

Social and Structural Determinants of Community Firearm Violence and Community Trauma - Shani A. L. Buggs, Nicole D. Kravitz-Wirtz, Julia J. Lund, 2022

Universal Values: What They Are, Classification and Most Outstanding Examples

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One's a stabbing and a few don't mention guns, so I am assuming firearms weren't involved. We've had pretty good gun regs in Canada for the most part. The current "gun buyback" is going to be wasting money taking things from law-abiding citizens. I always find it better to enforce laws already on the books rather than make new laws. And my theory on bans is that they are what politicians implement to pretend they are dealing with something while doing absolutely nothing. You haven't convinced me of your point, and I doubt I've convinced you of mine, and that's okay.

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What's the key value in spending billions over the years going after sport shooter as opposed to dealing with illegal importation, gang violence, and other public safety issues. Why not spend that money on useful ventures?

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Might save some lives because legal gun owners (sometimes) unwittingly have their guns accessed by children eg., some recent mass shooters used parent’s guns… but poverty, education, home life and culture, plays a role in tolerance for/against aggression, i.e.,Social Determinants of Health. Useful ventures entail poverty reduction, educational levels, healthy communities and decreasing huge disparities in wealth..in the population. Conservative ideology acts as if class and family connections plays no role in success/failure, hopelessness & violence— reflected in Conservative policy …

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How many mass killings have been caused by children accessing their parents guns in Canada?

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ZERO

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Thanks, but I was waiting for JLorraine to back up their opinion with a fact or two,

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Don't hold your breath. The extent of their cogent analysis is " might save some lives"...give me strength.

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