The proposed federal buyback program on prohibited firearms isn’t drawing any fanfare from a Prince George business owner.
Yesterday (Thursday), the Trudeau government announced that gun owners could receive over 13-hundred dollars for turning in an AR-15.
However, Cassy Premack with K.K.S Tactical Supplies told Vista Radio the price scale is a slap in the face to local firearms owners who likely paid double or triple the amount when they purchased it.
“When you are looking at $1,337 dollars for an AR platform when many competition shooters spent anywhere from five to eight thousand dollars on theirs. For things like the M-14, it’s a joke as they don’t have accurate portrayals as to what these firearms are worth.”
“For many of these people it’s a joke. Why would they want to be compensated less than a third of what their property is worth when they legally purchased it with money they earned through hard work and were taxed on previously.”
“In Canada, prior to this Liberal government coming in, sport shooting was considered part of Canadian Heritage and part of Canadian culture. It was often a sport that was found at the Olympics and everything like that. So, when you start to ban guns on their bore diameter or the amount of joules the exhumed or going off of just what they look like. The classifications of these firearms under the May 1st ban is that they are military assault style weapons, which isn’t an actual class of firearm anywhere in the world nor is it every been one in Canada. It covers things that have a telescopic stock and have a capability of pulling a high-capacity magazine even though we have really stringent laws around magazine capacity in Canada already,” added Premack.
Premack also believes the new system would be a drain on our tax system.
“It’s taxpayers money, paying for taxpayers property. So, it’s going to be a drain on our tax system for property that really should not be prohibited to begin with. These are tools not weapons – they are only used as a weapon if someone is a criminal.”
Lastly, she doesn’t anticipate that the northern uptake in the program will be very high due to a lack of trust with Ottawa.
“For many firearms owners, there is not a lot of trust in the federal government. For many of these firearms that were prohibited under the May 1st ban, they were previously non-restricted and the federal government has no record of who has what – so there is a lot mistrust in the firearms community.”
“When you start to target legal firearms owners, people who have been legally using these firearms for decades without incident it really isn’t an effective use of legislation or our taxpayer money. A lot of these firearms – the ones that were prohibited under the May 1st 2020 firearm ban were often used by hunters and if they were not used by hunters, then they were used by sport shooters.”
Input will also be gathered from gun owners, businesses, and industry on the proposed compensation amounts via an online survey from now until August 28th.
In May of 2020, Ottawa banned 1,500 firearms and their variants.