Over 13 deadly hours on April 18 and 19, Gabriel Wortman disguised himself as a Canadian Mountie and went to sixteen different locations in and around Portapique, Canada, where he killed 22 people and injured three others.  For the killings, Wortman used a handgun and long guns, all of which he obtained illegally.

On Friday, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau punished all Canadians for Wortman's act by reclassifying about 1,500 hitherto legal firearms as "prohibited."  By using reclassification, Trudeau was able to circumvent legislation.

According to the CBC, the ban is effective immediately and blocks all licensed gun-owners from selling, transporting, importing, or using their newly banned weapons.  There will be a two-year amnesty for unloading the guns through a "fair compensation" buy-back program (AKA a confiscation program).

Trudeau is banning any semi-automatic that can hold a magazine, which would seem to include shotguns, for the CBC says that "there are 105,000 firearms currently classified as 'restricted' that will now be classified as 'prohibited.'"  The CBC includes a list of those guns that are primarily targeted:

• M16, AR-10, AR-15 rifles and M4 carbine
• Ruger Mini-14 rifle
• US Rifle M14
• Vz58 rifle and CZ858 rifle
• Robinson Armament XCR rifle
• CZ Scorpion EVO 3 carbine and pistol
• Beretta Cx4 Storm carbine
• SIG Sauer SIG MCX and SIG Sauer SIG MPX carbines and pistols
• Swiss Arms Classic Green and Four Seasons series rifles

Trudeau isn't stopping with long guns, either.  He wants to get rid of handguns, too.  Bill Blair, the Canadian public safety minister, "promised Friday to enact legislation down the line to give municipalities the power to ban these firearms [handguns]."

The ban isn't only a blow to gun-owners.  It also strips the livelihood from gun dealers:

Banning weapons with "modern design" is an arbitrary and useless distinction, similar to banning Gore-Tex to make hikers wear wool jackets, said Alison de Groot, the managing director at the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association.

Although businesses are still doing the math, de Groot said the government's move will strand somewhere between $200 to $300 million worth of pre-paid merchandise in stores, at a time when small businesses are already getting hammered by the COVID-19 crisis.

[snip]

"The breadth of it was unbelievable to us," said de Groot. "So for our business owners, here's the situation: we just got hit in the head with a baseball bat."

From the depth of his ignorance, Trudeau informed hunters, "You don't need an AR-15 to bring down a deer."  That may be true, if you don't mind the possibility of the deer dying a slow, agonizing death, but you might need an AR-15 to bring down someone hopped up on drugs or insanity.  Even assuming that your first shot manages to hit the target, it may take several more shots to stop an attack.

What Trudeau has done, during a disruptive pandemic, is to leave law-abiding citizens helpless.  Anyone who goes to the store today is experiencing a first in modern Western life: shortages.  Shortages breed instability, and instability breeds violence.  Americans have responded by buying guns; Justin Trudeau has responded by leaving his people vulnerable to looters and other violent criminals.

Leftists, with their limited ability to see beyond the obvious, focus only on the relative few who die because of gun crimes.  They are incapable of seeing those who live because of gun protection.  According to a 2013 study that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered, "[d]efensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence":

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.

If the police had used an Alert Ready in Portapique to warn people about Wortman, and if the people sheltering had owned guns, Wortman's rampage might have been terminated early.  That's water under the bridge.  Going forward, we know with certainty that if someone in Canada goes on another shooting spree, Canadians will be sitting ducks.

Trudeau has also ensured that Canadians no longer have recourse against a tyrannical government.  Those gleeful citizens who support this executive order disarming them forget that, in any country, at any time, the biggest killer is a government going after its own disarmed citizens.  It was by disarming citizens that the Nazis, the Soviets, the Chinese communists, the Khmer Rouge, and all the other mass murderers were able to engage in the mass slaughter of their own people.

This will not end well.