Gun Rights

In Alberta, firearms were never just policy. They were tools. On farms, ranches, and in rural communities, they were part of daily life: pest control, livestock protection, and hunting for food. That agrarian foundation shaped a culture of responsibility and familiarity. In much of eastern, urban Canada, firearms are viewed through a different lens — crime prevention, public safety risk, metropolitan policing. That cultural divide sits beneath today’s conflict.

The federal Liberals’ gun buyback scheme just keeps getting more and more expensive and more and more useless by the week.

Late last year, the feds conducted a trial run of their confiscation program, more than five years after they first announced it. For six weeks on Cape Breton, regional police accepted banned guns that were being turned in by their owners in return for compensation.

“Red flag” orders were billed as a faster, simpler way to keep Canadian communities safe by temporarily removing legal firearms from the hands of those who might do themselves — or others — harm. They were part of a suite of gun control measures introduced in the wake of 2020’s Portapique, N.S., mass shooting, the deadliest in the country’s history.

But more than two years after the orders finally became federal law, it’s unclear if they are working as designed — because no one appears to be keeping track of when, where or how often they are being implemented.

Six years ago, an Order-in-Council (OIC) banned more than 2,500 models of what Ottawa calls “assault-style” firearms. That OIC included common hunting and sporting rifles that were owned, stored, and used legally.

In January 2026, Mark Carney’s Liberal government finally launched its long-promised “Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program.”

What’s going on in the Canadian gun world these days? Same as always—more legal wrangling back-and-forth between shooters and the government. But there have been some relatively major recent developments with the federal government’s so-called buyback. The feds are steaming full speed ahead, or trying to, while an increasingly large number of partners are telling the government, “We’re not helping.”

I’m not making this one up. Minnesota’s Democrats, called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party because we are weird here, have proposed a law to make owning an AR-15, the most popular rifle in America, selling 3-4 million copies a year, a felony with a sentence of up to five years.

Attempting to rape somebody in the presence of a child is, in Minnesota statutes, a lessor crime than owning one if this law passes.

The Nunavut government says it will not be using police resources on the federal gun buyback program, and solutions proposed by Ottawa do not apply to the territory.

More than 2,500 types of so-called “assault-style” weapons have been illegal in Canada since 2020. The federal government has an amnesty order in place for the guns and is offering to buy them back from businesses and individual owners.

When Defense Distributed first unveiled its Liberator model, it was kind of a special moment in the world of the Second Amendment. It was suddenly clear that you couldn’t stop the signal, and that gun control’s last hopes of stopping people from getting guns were over.

Yes, that’s a good thing.