“Other than using firearms for sport shooting and for hunting, there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.”
– Justin Truedeau in a poor attempt to justify an attempted ban of all firearms in Canada
There’s no reason a modern nation such as Canada should have a leader which allows his poltical druthers guide his policy decisions in spite of the potential for these decisions to negatively impact Canadians and yet here you are Mr. Trudeau.
I remember watching a podcast a couple of years ago talking about gun control issues. They were talking about a thread on Twitter, which started with a sweeping statement, similar to this, about how there was no reason anyone in the United States could possibly need to own a firearm.
There was a response fairly early on, saying something to the effect of “if I don’t have a gun, what do I do to protect my family and livestock when a pack of wild boar tears across my land?”
The responses were predictable. Things like:
“OMG! You’re insane! Things like that don’t happen!”
“LOL! Your (sic) and idiot!”
“It has to something real.”
The person responded with a news article from his local, rural, paper about packs of wild boar stampeding the area where he lived, causing property damage, killing or injuring livestock and injuring a few people.
The mocking stopped, and no one had a good response.
As often happens in political discussion, people forget that not everyone lives like they do. Personal and family protection is a perfectly plausible reason for firearm ownership, in rural, urban and suburban areas, but in rural areas, it’s basically essential. Not only do they have potential issues with wild, often dangerous, animals, they’re usually further removed from law enforcement than people in the city. Response time in the city can be long enough. People who live out in the country might not have a police station less than 50 miles from them.
I’ve mentioned this from time to time during gun control discussions, and the idea is often met with derision – some people in the city view country folk as backwards rednecks and have no concern for their well-being.
That’s a horribly crass attitude on its own. Even if the way people in the country live is different than their lives in the city, it doesn’t make them any less deserving of safety and security. I also wonder how many of these people actually know anyone from the country. I’ve lived in Dallas and I’ve lived rural, and I can say from experience, people in small towns and in the country are good, honest, hard-working people. They’re usually friendlier and more considerate than people living in the city.
If urban people need a reason which affects them more directly, most of the food grown or raised in the United States is raised in the country. If they like being able to eat, they might ought to show a little more consideration for the fellow citizens who live in the country.
As a side note, situations like this illustrate the reason federalism is good and why I oppose much of the legislation which is passed at the national level. It often doesn’t take into consideration the different lives and the different needs of people living in different parts of our nation. People in Hawaii might have different lifestyles than those living in Alaska. People in New York have different needs than those living in Idaho.
It’s important to remember that our nation is made up off all different types of people, with a wide variety of careers and interests that they have molded their lives to suit. Expecting everyone to live the same way is impractical and it smacks of fascism. Real fascism, not the version that is so popular in modern vernacular.
Unless I’m greatly mistaken, Canada has a significant number of people who live rural, and probably need their firearms to protect themselves and their families. It’s a tragedy that their leader either hasn’t realized this or simply doesn’t care.
