So here is the thing. As a licensed Canadian gun owner I have the support for the following laws that are already in existence:

I support the licensing and vetting scheme as it was established, this has been very effective. In Canada you need two references, you need a background check, and you need to take and pass the safety courses for your desired type of firearm. For an PAL alone (Possession and Acquisition License), you need the safety course on rifles and shotguns. For the RPAL (Restricted PAL) you need to take one for handguns, too. I also support safe storage of firearms as it stands now.

I need to mention that most gun owners are OK with the above laws, too.

What I do NOT support.

I do NOT support the banning of over 15,000 (the current amount, there have been more banned previously) of models of rifles solely based on, ‘I do not like this gun, I think it is bad’. They didn’t say ‘we want to ban AR-15s’ alone, they banned every single distinct model of AR-15 ever produced. This is stupid. They also banned rifles that were formerly non-restricted rifles that were nothing more than simple target rifles or hunting guns just because. They even banned rifles that have been out of production since the 1940s simply because they were used during WW2 in some limited capacity (they are not anymore dangerous than any hunting rifle made afterward).

I do not support banning any type of firearm based purely on some ideological idea, saying ‘this is a military gun!’ Dude! Literally every single bolt-action rifle design was military, ditto for lever-guns, break-actions, and muzzle loaders. Flintlock muskets were military… and this brings me to another point.

Did you know that they banned flintlock pistols? I need to mention that flintlock muskets are still on the unregulated firearm list. That means if you want to buy a musket, you don’t need any firearms permit, you can buy one online in Canada right now. But before the 2022 handgun freeze, flintlock pistols were treated the same way as modern pistols. Meaning if you found a flintlock pistol and decided to take it home with you, it would be treated as if it was a Glock if you are discovered with it. I do not know of any other country that has done this. Even the UK still permits single-shot muzzle loaders to be sold and used in ranges. All of continental Europe also has flintlock pistols as fully unregulated firearms, meaning anyone can buy one. But in Canada? You’ll get several years in jail if you have one.

On top of that before the law was amended, they originally tried to ban non-firing replica old west firearms. Are you aware of how stupid that is? Can you imagine someone who likes old west guns, but doesn’t actually want a real gun, so he gets a non-firing replica that cannot be loaded or fired, but still functions similar to the original (the hammer and triggers move, you can open the loading gate, etc) and then one day he is now in possession of a prohibited firearm because of the law? Meaning if discovered with it, he will be treated as if he was in possession of a machine gun.

There are just countless stupid laws that they tried to pass. They inadvertently banned almost all shotguns at one point due to a badly written part, and they wanted to ban the .50BMG (which has never, ever been used in a crime in Canada, and only used once in a crime in the US in the early 80s) but in doing so ended up banning multiple big game hunting cartridges that in no way shape or form are similar to the anti-material round that the .50 BMG is.

Do you get me now? I’m OK with licensing and other basic stuff, those stuff have been very effective. Most everything else is just a war on shooting sports and a massive, MASSIVE, waste of tax payer money. Money that could have been put into countless other uses to save more lives than any of the gun laws ever could.

Let’s just blame sam

Caelen Conrad explained it better than I could here

But I will make it a tl;dr (or tl;dw, whatever suits you) for you. Having a gun, or access to a gun, alone is insufficient to make a mass shooting or mass murder at all possible, especially when you have someone who could have been stopped or talked out of it in any number ways at any time, such as the Tumblr ridge shooter, or the Nazi Incel that Conrad talks about. ChatGPT not only did none of that, it greatly removed friction from the psychological process of working up to do it (killing people is not easy. I don’t mean that just in a physical sense of shooting or beating someone to death, it takes a LOT to get one human being to kill another human being) and the actual planning process of the shooting.

Do you know why we don’t see a lot of successful bombings? Or why bombings are fairly rare? The reason for this is the skill and skill set to actually do something like that successfully is difficult to acquire. You could spend a lot of time learning chemistry and electronics and craftsmanship and sourcing the required materials to do it, and that is not easy in and of itself. The internet has been awash with bomb making guides for decades, but even buying the materials needed (and in some places even ASKING about where to find the stuff) to build a bomb often raises alarm bells in many systems that would have the police take you in for questioning. However if an LLM could somehow tell you ‘here’s how to buy what you need to make a big bomb without raising suspicion’ and provides the links, and then gives clear step by step instructions on what to do for your specific purpose, it has removed 90% of all the work.

In short, without the support of chatGPT, the shooting would likely have never happened, or if it did, it would have resulted in far fewer deaths than it did. I mean this for both tumbler ridge and for the Nazi incel shooting.

Edit: Also the fact that chatGPT did not have the ability to report these shooters meant that disclosing their plans to it, even if it didn’t help them as much, would have still facilitated in getting their plans out of their brains and disclosed somewhere. Many shooters are thwarted because they talk about wanting to do what they want to do to another human being, who DID report their asses to the authorities.