Category Archives: Shooting Sports

Smoke & Mirrors

Man I’m pretty damn left on most things but the conservative saying about never letting a tragedy go to waste is very true when it comes to gun control.

People love to listen to former cops except when it doesn’t fit their political narrative.  The gun control proposed would have done nothing to stop the NS shooter from going on his rampage but it’s a great political opportunity to push a bullshit agenda that does nothing but fool the public into thinking something’s being done.

The federal Liberal government is poised to ban some types of firearms — and those new prohibitions could be made public as soon as Friday, sources told Radio-Canada.

The gun control changes come in the wake of Nova Scotia’s recent tragedy, which saw an armed man kill 23 innocents and leave others wounded. The gunman, who was not licensed to possess firearms, used guns illegally obtained in Canada and from U.S. sources to carry out his crimes.

Source: CBC

I think that last line is most important his guns were illegally obtained so how would more laws stop it?  Assault, murder, pretending to be a police officer are already all illegal but hey weapon laws will stop people in their tracks…  What utter bullshit, well you can bet I’m going to be calling my MP tomorrow about this, good thing I’m a Liberal part member!

Well that happened…

So yeah today I bought a 20″ Mossberg 590a1 lol.  It was such a good deal that even Maggie thought the price was great and I couldn’t resist.

And I don’t even like shotguns lol…  At the top is my Canadian made Mossberg 400g with an 18.5″ barrel same length as the middle 590a1 and at the bottom the new 20″ variant.  Again I wasn’t looking to buy a new gun but here I am.  I want to get a M9 bayonet so I can stick it onto the front of the gun, a Surefire flashlight fore grip and a bantam stock so I get a shorter length of pull.  This must be designed for someone who’s 6′ tall, it’s a bit far for my body style.

Anyway I can’t shoot anything so I’ll just rack the pump till I can get out to the range.

Liberal gun policy

I’ve argued gun policy on my blog many times and the latest rumors are that the Liberals want to prohibit certain rifles like the AR15 and other “assault weapons” as well as handguns or with the latter put handguns in some form of government approved central storage.

A re-elected Liberal government will ban some types of “assault-style” rifles, as well as introduce additional restrictions on where firearms can be possessed or stored, according to Bill Blair, who has been the party’s pointman on gun control.

The planned measures will be announced “very, very shortly” as part of the Liberals’ campaign platform, Blair said in an interview with The Fifth Estate.

“I have recommended that there are certain weapons that are currently not prohibited that should be prohibited, which means no one should be allowed to have those weapons in our society,” he said.

“I will tell you that I am confident that a Liberal government will enact effective regulation and legislation … to remove weapons that are, in my opinion, just too dangerous in a civil society.”

Source: CBC

If you read entries on my blog you’ll know my views definitely lead left on most issues and I think my biggest problem is that the government wants to ban an item that has never been used in a crime in Canada but based on how it’s used in other countries.  So what does prohibition mean, if the Liberals prohibit guns like they’ve done in the past, I would still be able to keep my AR15s (I have 3), but I wouldn’t be allowed to use them anymore so what’s the point.  I don’t see how it’s fair that something I acquired legally can be deemed illegal with a stroke of a pen and this goes back to the argument that Canadians do not have property rights.

Next there are all these proposals to put further restrictions on legal gun owners but I haven’t heard about the Liberal plan to deal with illegal guns which gangs & organized crime use to perpetrate violence. Interesting isn’t it, it’s almost like this is a ploy to make people feel safe rather than deal with the issue of gun violence.

Can gun control be part of the solution, definitely but to think that banning guns from legal gun owners will solve the issue of gun violence is well ridiculous.  There are no easy answers to life’s problems and to think this will make the streets safer is foolhardy.

What to do about the violence?

So gun violence has been in the news, a bunch of people were shot while we were away and Mayor Tory immediately reiterated his call for a handgun ban which I thought immediately was stupid because Toronto Police chief Sanders said the shootings were gang related, do we expect gang members to forfeit their guns?  Anyway I do have a bit of hope because of this response by the police chief.

“We are not going to arrest our way out of this,” Saunders told reporters at police headquarters Friday morning, calling for a “multi-faceted” approach to addressing gun violence in his second news conference about the surge in violence in the past week.

He said of the recent shootings, they “by and large have street gang connotations to them or are street gang related.” He said that doesn’t mean at times innocent people are not impacted and acknowledged it has been traumatic for those people.

There have been 19 incidents since Aug. 3, including a daytime shooting in East York on Friday that killed one man and injured another person.

Saunders said the shootings are a reality for many communities and are primarily located in areas that form a “U” shape of neighbourhoods in the city — parts of northwest Toronto, downtown, and Scarborough — that are stuck in a cycle of poverty and where people lack access to opportunities for education and jobs.

Source: Toronto Star

I don’t like Chief Sanders because I think he’s too much of a politician but he’s right here, if we truly want to deal with the issue of gun violence we need to look at and deal with all the factors that lead to someone picking up a gun in the first place.  This is a start, I’m glad that the police chief is saying the right things and hopefully other politicians follow suit with action rather than just words.

Throwing money at more policing will not solve this problem but at least our leaders are starting to get the right idea.

Argh at easy answers!!!

I’m so sick and tired of politicians peddling quick and easy answers to societal problems.  I know I harp on this a lot but really there is no easy answer to Toronto’s gun or violence problems and I especially hate John Tory for being a pompous ass for pushing a gun ban and I’ll mention reasons why it’s silly shortly but this quite really bothered me.

City council last year, in the wake of the Danforth attack that killed two people and injured 13 others, asked the Justin Trudeau Liberal government to ban the sale of handguns in Toronto.

Source: The Star

As I’ve discussed many times, the Danforth loser (I call all mass shooters losers because it’s what they are) was using an illegally acquired firearm, his brother was arrested for drug & gun smuggling so spare me on how a ban would have prevented the attack.  Also the gun used was in the prohibited class so anyone who got their gun license after 1996 (like me) can’t even acquire one if we wanted. Gun bans simply don’t work because they only target legal gun owners, it’s already illegal to point a gun at someone or to kill but politicians think that a gun ban would cause criminals to think twice?  Again it’s a measure to sound good that does nothing in real terms, I really wish those who create laws & regulations would go through and educate themselves on the actual process.

Does one really think that if the Danforth loser didn’t have a gun that he’d simply stay home?  Those who are committed to acts of violence will find ways, just as the other loser used a van to kill a bunch of people last year.

Now how do you address gun violence (or violence in general)?  First we need to identify the root causes of gun violence, which the majority lead to gang fights so what causes people to join gangs?  Lack of opportunity, after school programs & even systemic racism…  If you’re poor and have a family to feed, you will do whatever it takes to feed that family, even if the means are illegal.  What Doug Ford is doing by cutting funding to education will only exacerbate the problem but hey he has an ideology to stick to as well.

The recently passed Bill C71 cracks down on legal gun owners, requires me to have extra paperwork to bring my guns to the range, classifies certain weapons as prohibited even though they’ve been sold as non restricted for decades and carves out new prohibited classes…  This was done in the name of public safety but I fail to see anything that cracks down on those who use their guns for illegal mans.

Bill C75 on the other hand lessens the time someone spends behind bars for someone who’s in organized crime.  So on one hand the Liberal government cracks down on people like me and give actual criminals an easier time, really it’s that insane.

There are no easy answers to gun problems and as with everything else in life, be wary of those who peddle them as a way to win your support because they’re deceiving you.

I voted for Trudeau last time out but this and with their bungles during their term will force me to vote for someone else in Oct.  Ideologically the majority of my views are closest to what’s called a classic liberalism but that’s not the way the Liberal Party of Canada governs and I wish Trudeau and the rest of the political “leaders” would actually lead instead of peddling stupid answers.

Pew pew!

So today Mario, Brayden and I went to Silverdale and man it’s been a long time since I shot something!  Unfortunately the competition ranges are still closed but we had a good time none the less and I’m happy to report despite not firing a gun in months my skills didn’t really degrade. 🙂  In the steel target area, there’s a 2″ plate that I could reliably hit 8/10 from 10 yards but couldn’t do a perfect run.

After some pistol work, we went to the 25 meter range to shoot the ARs and man I do love my AR15s!

I brought along my camera and took these shots. Mario or Brayden took the pictures of me and they turned out pretty well I thought.

Looking forward to doing a class soon, getting rusty and could use the practice. 🙂

 

It won’t do anything so let’s do it!

It’s been very busy so I haven’t had much time to blog but when I do, it’s about gun control lol.

So the Liberal government is signalling that it’s going to do something to address gun crime by… targeting legal gun owners yet again.  This is just more of the same, to give the appearance that they’re being tough on crime when they’re not addressing the issue at all.  I get that the public would like something to be done and a ban sounds good but do you actually think it’s going to affect what criminals do?  The shooting that started this all, the one on the Danforth was an illegally obtained gun.

The notion of banning certain firearms raises questions such as whether Ottawa would “grandfather” those owners who already have legally registered handguns and allow them to keep their weapons, or whether the government would buy back their weapons.

The source said the $1.5 billion to $2 billion estimate for a handgun buyback was based on a loose estimate of 1 million handguns registered in Canada. The source added there are “probably” twice that number in illegal, unregistered handguns in circulation.

Source: The Star

LOL at that last sentence, so this law will deal with the 33% of legal guns while ignoring the 66% of illegal guns in the hands of criminals, that right there sums up the government’s position nicely.  The government is also frankly lying about guns being domestically sourced, I’m sure it happens but the RCMP which handles the Canadian Firearms Program does not keep that data, it simply doesn’t exist!!!  Don’t like guns fine, isn’t it a problem that the government lies to push an agenda?

Sigh, I’m a card carrying Liberal member and will be complaining to my MP about this.

90 murders so far

I’m glad politicians are looking beyond the tool that’s used to kill and actually want to deal with the issue of gang violence.

Saunders said, however, gang dynamics are complex and there’s no simple way to pinpoint the cause of the violence.

Some shootings, he said, are the result of gang-on-gang warfare, or someone acting on a personal grudge. And then there are deaths of innocent bystanders that get caught in the crossfire.

Taverner estimated of Toronto’s 363 shootings this year, almost 40 per cent occur in north Etobicoke. He said the area has a history of gang activity, turf wars and retaliation, and guns and drugs.
Source: CBC

I’m seeing a lot of good talk, about the city investing in after school programs for at risk youth, the governments of all levels talk about the needs to deter kids from joining gangs to begin with which is great. This will actually help with the issue of gun violence, more needs to be done of course and I’d suggest looking at our drug laws as the next step.  A ban on law abiding owners is simply window dressing that does not address the root causes of these problems.

Gun control discussion

So there was a “town hall” on gun control in Toronto yesterday, I would have liked to attend but was busy spending time with the family.  In any case I put quotations around town hall because from the people I know who went, the questions in the Q&A portion were screened before hand and the more poignant questions about the numbers were not addressed.

Mr. Blair, a former Toronto Police chief who spoke at Sunday’s event, has been tasked with stick-handling the handgun issue. He said that moving forward, “evidence” will help guide him. But at the town hall, even the evidence proved contentious.

As he sat onstage speaking, Mr. Blair cited Toronto Police figures indicating that an increasing proportion of guns used in crime are coming from domestic sources (as opposed to illegally through the border) – at least of those guns that police are able to track. That comment drew loud booing, with some shouting that the minister was misrepresenting the data.

Source: The Globe & Mail

Emphasis are mine & gun owners are upset because that’s a blatant lie and I illustrated that fact previously with actual Toronto police data which does not say that at all.

The video player embedding from CP24 doesn’t seem to work but how about listen to Louis March, founder of the Zero Gun violence group.

He gets it, banning guns is the easy (wrong) answer to the problem of gun violence, let’s tackle the root causes of gun crime.  Poverty and lack of opportunity often leads gangs and hence gang violence and how we solve this is difficult to answer.  How about a reinvestment in poorer areas which bring opportunity to the local populace so people are not struggling to feed their families?  Raise the minimum wage to a living wage, end the war drugs, let’s remove the money and power from these criminal elements.

Of course these are difficult issues to tackle, it’s easier to blame an inanimate object and call it evil.  As I mentioned to one commenter, homicides are committed at the same rate with knives as guns over a 5 year period (actually there are more stabbings, 939 vs 862 shooting homicides) but we don’t talk about banning knives right.  Let’s really do something rather than token gestures but that’s not sexy and will take more than 4 years so politicians are not interested.

Bang bang

So today I took my father in law and Maggie to the range (with the help from Mario) and they had a great time.  Maggie’s dad is I think 65 but for an old guy he handled himself pretty well.  I think he was disappointed that he didn’t shoot as well as he thought he could and I kept telling Maggie to translate that everyone sucks especially with pistols first time out.

I think it’s been a year since I got Maggie to come shooting and she had a good time too.  She’s pretty petite so normally she can’t handle much more than a .22 LR pistol or rifle but today she was trying out the 9mm HK SFP9 and did alright. It was pretty hot and everyone was tired around 11 so we packed up and went home.

In the afternoon Michael one of Brandon’s friend’s came over and played for a few hours, not really sure what they were doing but there was a lot of running and laughing so that’s good.  Tomorrow I’m driving to Chicago for a conference, I really hate airports (I don’t mind flying) so I’m going for a nice long drive which should be fun.  Packed everything including my SLR, will see if I can get some cool pictures when I’m not in the office.

Rest early tonight, long day ahead tomorrow. 🙂