LILLEY: Trudeau’s list of banned guns becoming the Butt Master of jokes

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The Butt Master sounds like the kind of fitness product that would show up on a late-night infomercial or bad social media ad.

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Instead, it’s one of the guns Justin Trudeau is banning to keep Canada safe from mass shootings, or that’s what he keeps telling us.

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“We don’t need assault-style weapons that were designed to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time,” Trudeau said when introducing Bill C-21 earlier this year.

He’s continued to use that kind of language even as his government has come under fire for expanding the bill to include hunting rifles and shotguns. The Butt Master, though, doesn’t fit the description of a hunting rifle or shotgun and it’s not an “assault-style weapon” designed to “kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time.”

The Butt Master is a single shot pen gun that must be partly disassembled to load the single bullet it can shoot. There’s also only one of them and it is still in the possession of the man who designed it 23 years ago.

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“How the hell does the Canadian government know about it?” asked gun designer Mark Serbu in a video he posted to YouTube just over a week ago.

“It didn’t go anywhere, it didn’t get sold, it didn’t transfer out. It’s been here is my possession.”

Serbu, who owns a gunsmithing business in the Tampa, Florida area, also has three other guns on the banned list. Each of those guns are 50-calibre target shooting rifles manufactured for sale. Serbu has sold thousands of these kinds of guns over the years, but he’s only made one Butt Master, which he still owns.

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Ban is the Butt of jokes

There would be legitimate reasons for banning pen guns, such as how easy they are to conceal, but the truth is the Butt Master is already illegal in Canada, that is if you could even get the existing one off of Serbu.

Canada has long had regulations on guns with extremely short barrels and the Butt Master, like all pen guns, has a very short barrel – it would be measured in millimetres, not inches. The banned list of guns includes two other brands of pen guns that would also be illegal under existing Canadian law.

The banned list also includes taser devices, guns designed for shooting gas cannisters and flares, several anti-tank guns from nearly a century ago. There are antique shotguns that are banned like the Webley and Scott Wild Fowl Gun that you are more likely to spot while watching aristocrats shoot in an episode of The Crown or Downton Abbey that at a crime scene in Canada.

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One gun on the list, the Cycles de St Etienne Cannon Breech Punt Gun, is a giant beast of a firearm that loads like a cannon and fires like a shotgun and was used by commercial duck hunters a century ago.

Neither the punt gun nor the pen gun are designed to “”kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time.” These are not the guns that will be used in street crime or mass shootings, the incidents Trudeau says he is trying to protect Canadians from.

The Liberals have used the name and image of the AR-15, used in so many mass shootings in the United States, to market their gun control efforts in Canada. They are relying on low information voters who don’t know one end of a gun from the other to continue to support them.

Including guns like the Butt Master though, or the Cycles de St Etienne Cannon Breech Punt Gun, shows this isn’t about dealing with crime or public safety. Neither is the attempt to ban so many hunting guns relied upon across the country.

The government is saying they will review the list during the Christmas break but perhaps, given the inclusion of the Butt Master and other ridiculous guns, they should just walk away and start again.

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Full list of guns the Trudeau government wants to ban.

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