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A quick thread on this, in response to people saying that a right to bear arms is the product of the American rebellion against Britain and alien to the British an Canadian traditions. Sorry, but you are just wrong. 1/ https://twitter.com/DoubleAspect/status/1310533254320021504
Let's start with Blackstone, who says that the right to have arms for self-defence is a natural right of the subject. (Source: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2140#Blackstone_1387-01_837) Of course, this right is subject to legal regulation, like all rights, but that doesn't make it not a right.
Next, let's look at the Bill of Rights 1688, to which Blackstone refers. (Source: http://legislation.govt.nz/act/imperial/1688/0002/latest/DLM4663805.html.) This qualifies the natural right in the anti-Catholic and classist way of the Glorious Revolution, but preserves it for the majority of the subjects. 3/
It is this right, which they had as British subjects, that the Americans protected in the 2nd Amendment, as Justice Scalia explains in Heller. They simply came back to the natural law position of removing religious and classist qualifications. 4/
The *right* to bear arms is as much a part of the British, and therefore Canadian, constitutional tradition as it is of the American one. The difference, as ever, is in who gets the final say about its scope. In Britain and Canada, it's Parliament, not the courts. 5/
As the Alberta Court of Appeal explained in the Firearms Act Reference (the SCC didn't discuss history much at all), gun *control* in the modern sense (i.e. prior restraint on the possession of guns) didn't start until the 1930s. Prohibitions didn't start until the 60s. 6/
I'm speculating here, but the Canada of the 1860s was a frontier society, and if you'd told the framers of the BNA Act 1867 that "peace, order, and good government" meant gun control, as we understand it, they'd probably have thought you were mad. 7/
All of that is not to say that leaving the regulation of the natural right of self-defence to Parliament is wrong. I have no firm views on this. But the idea that modern gun control is foundational to Canada's constitutional tradition just doesn't hold up. 8/
And this takes me back to my original point. Nationalism (and in Canada this means anti-Americanism), warps people's perceptions of rights, to the point where they misunderstand or ignore their own constitutional heritage. Dixi. 9/9
