Canada banned the ownership of so-called assault weapons. Currently, people who have them can keep them, but only until the Canadian government can figure out its complete and total clusterflop of a mandatory buyback.

Pro-gun groups have criticized every aspect of this, including the ban but also the buyback itself. 

Nothing about that is surprising. What might be shocking, though, is that a major gun control organization in Canada is also taking issue with the buyback. They’re also acknowledging, whether they mean to or not, that the ban isn’t going to accomplish anything.

The Trudeau government is losing a key ally in its efforts to take hundreds of thousands of military-style firearms out of circulation, jeopardizing one of the top items in its public security agenda.

Launched in 2020, the federal government’s plan to buy back and destroy firearms it has banned — such as AR-15s — has long been vilified by firearms industry groups and the Conservative Party of Canada.

But the project is now coming under friendly fire from PolyRemembers, a gun-control group that is threatening to withdraw its support for the buyback program unless Ottawa broadens its scope to include military-style firearms that remain legal.

The group warns that owners of banned firearms will be able to use their federal compensation cheques to obtain other guns that offer many of the same characteristics and mechanical functions as the banned firearms.

“It’s a waste of Canadians’ money. We are not reducing the risk level, we are just replacing the makes and models,” said PolyRemembers spokesperson Nathalie Provost.

The cost of the program has not yet been made public but it’s expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The current version of the program is “a sieve,” said Provost, who survived numerous bullet wounds in the massacre that took the lives of 14 women at the Polytechnique engineering school in Montreal nearly 35 years ago.

Granted, they don’t have an issue with the ban or the idea of a buyback. Their issue is really that people can then turn around and buy a rifle that’s perfectly legal.

Which, to be fair, is exactly what a lot of people can and will do.

Where we differ is that I see this as a case of being able to make the best of a bad situation why they see it as the end of the world.

It should be noted that despite the Polytechnique Montreal shooting in 1989 and the 2020 Nova Scotia rampage shooting, Canada’s not exactly eat up with public mass murders like that. Whatever problems we have here in the United States, they don’t have whatever triggers these killings there, and that’s despite there having been a lot of these AR-style rifles floating around in private hands for decades, including those with barrel lengths that would be illegal in the US with the appropriate NFA paperwork.

So it’s really not the end of the world that some people might buy different firearms.

As it stands, nothing is stopping a would-be mass murderer here and now and it’s just not happening.

Still, it amuses me to see Trudeau’s government get hammered over gun control by a gun control group. It makes me giggle.