MP Shields disagrees with gun legislation

By Ian Croft
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
news@tabertimes.com

One controversial area when looking at government oversight is an individual’s private possessions. One at the forefront right now is Bill C-21 and some amendments that have been implemented.

“The hearings that are going on in Ottawa, there’s a lot of information that comes out,” said Bow River MP Martin Shields. “One of the ones that is concerning coming out of committee is to deal with Bill C-21. It’s to do with the Liberal’s gun legislation. How committee works is, you study a piece of legislation, you have witnesses, and then when you have all the witnesses, you have possible amendments. Well, right at the last minute through that process, the Liberals put in an amendment where they are saying that guns that hunters — duck hunters, big game hunters, sport shooters those types of guns that have never been talked about being challenged by the Liberal government — they put an amendment in to prohibit those guns. This will affect millions of people across this country who are sports shooters in the sense of hunting.”

Shields continued highlighting that one of the main issues with this amendment is that all of the studies done relating to violence with guns didn’t focus on the types of guns that they wish to restrict with the amendment.

“That one really crossed the line in the sense of that’s not where the issue of guns is. Studies will tell you there is more violence in major urban centres and it is with illegal handguns. Not the guns, or the rifles, or the shotguns that our hunters are using in this country that legal people handle in an appropriate way, storing them the right way, and hunting most of the time for food that they use themselves. Other people do it for sports competitions — ski shooting and those kinds of competitions. These are not the guns that the government should be dealing with, but they drop that amendment at the last moment in the committee dealing with Bill C-21 gun legislation. That is wrong in the sense of what they want to do is go after our legal gun owners with shotguns and rifles. I don’t think that’s right at all.”

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