A political beliefs test for German gun owners may coming if their Interior Minister gets his way. This desire to test for thought crimes is sparked by Germany’s latest lunatic with a gun and his hate-filled internet manifesto.
Once a gun owner beliefs test implemented there, you can bet it will come to Canada next, courtesy of Loki Hulgaard’s Racist Manifesto or another one like it.
Racist Killer Sparks Call For German Thought Police
On February 20, 2020, a licenced gun owner walked into two shisha bars in Germany and killed nine people before going home, killing his mother and finally himself. Chancellor Angela Merkel was quick to label the killer as a “right-wing extremist” with “racist” motives.
Horst Seehofer, Germany’s Interior Minister, ratcheted up the rhetoric, saying he wants to add a political beliefs test to his country’s firearm licencing scheme. He stopped short of calling for mandatory psychiatric tests.
“This is not only about the question of whether someone has properly stored his weapon or kept the ammunition separate from it – it must also be about very personal matters.”
Bild, Germany’s largest-selling newspaper, echoed Seehofer’s plans to investigate the political beliefs of gun owners.
“We need new and stricter laws to regularly and thoroughly check owners of hunting and firearm licenses. We immediately need more (intelligence) positions to monitor right-wing radicals and intervene before it’s too late.”
Horst Seehofer’s desire to examine “very personal matters” and Bild’s desire to “monitor right-wing radicals” likely means they want to limit gun ownership to those with “approved” political beliefs, raising the spectre of both George Orwell’s 1984 and the Minority Report.
The groundwork for this is well established in the attitudes of many activists and politicians who dislike civilians owning firearms.
“Every gun owner is law abiding…until they are not.”
This statement is correct – not broadly, of course – but for a minuscule percentage of people who are issued a Possession and Acquisition Licence by the RCMP’s Canadian Firearms Centre.
The terrifying and more pressing issue is this handful of formerly-legal gun owners tend to drop a trail of innocent bodies in their wake – often before killing themselves like the pathetic cowards they are.
If we could find a way to convince these unbalanced individuals to start their killing sprees with the last person on their list, themselves, all this misery would be avoided.
But we can’t… and they don’t.
They start at the wrong end of the list and leave us to clean up the nightmare left behind – the physical expression of their unbalanced minds and deranged manifestos.
Public Safety Canada’s Quick Facts
Right-wing extremism refers to a range of individuals and groups, often in online communities, who hold a wide range of issues and grievances that are backed by hatred and fear. These can include, but are not limited to: anti-government and anti-law enforcement sentiment, the advocacy of white nationalism and racial separation, and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Is Canada’s Thought Police Next?
The collision between our Charter-protected right to Freedom of Thought and Expression and the government’s desire to keep the public safe is inevitable.
These ideals are never easy to balance – not for governments or individuals – and the question is always the same.
Where do you draw the line?
On August 21, 2019, the Government of Canada, through Bill Blair’s Public Safety Ministry, announced funding of $304,253 over three years for a Quebec college’s project, The Far-Right in Quebec: Actors, Ideologies, and Prevention.
Cégep Édouard-Montpetit will “examine the far-right extremism movement in Quebec through media research and interviews with experts and activists” to help stop this “growing movement” in Quebec.
“By developing a stronger grasp of the behaviors and motivations that fuel the current far-right extremism movement in Quebec, we can support local organizations and police services to develop better tools and strategies to counter this dangerous ideology and to help keep our communities safe,” said Sherry Romanado, Member of Parliament for Longueuil–Charles-LeMoyne.
Jim Bronskill, investigating for The Canadian Press, wrote:
CSIS, which has spent much of the last two decades investigating jihadi-inspired terrorism, said last year it was increasingly preoccupied by those looking to support or engage in violence that is racially motivated, ethno-nationalist, anti-government or misogynist in nature.
I oppose the government’s position on a wide variety of issues. While my motives are not “racially motivated, ethno-nationalist, or misogynist in nature“, depending on how “anti-government” is defined, I could easily fall inside those parameters.
Where does this leave us, as a nation?
I don’t know.
Will my only hope for salvation, should a political beliefs test come to Canada, rest in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a document which is so often not worth the paper its printed on?
I am surprised he hasn’t thought of this already. But I won’t hold my breath until he does..
Reminds me of the Belief Tests not that long ago in England, where Roman Catholics in particular were discriminated against “to the death”. English history is littered with “Priest Holes” (places in homes where a visiting Catholic priest could hide when the authorities came looking for him). Northern Ireland’s history is overflowing with murders of those who held the wrong “beliefs”. These days the three Abrahamic “sky god” religions are at each others throats.. Have we evolved from such tribal roots? Hardly. Everyone has the right to protect themselves and their families. Until that right is recognized, we will continue to have the belief test that firearms are only permitted for hunting and target sports and possibly for collecting and as investments. By that standard, we already have “belief tests”.
That’s precisely it!!! Humankind’s history is full of witch hunts. Now they’re saying it’s all gone ages ago but it’s actually not. People are essentially the same.
Thought police is already in place. You have a smartphone? Then all your data is readily available to intelligence services and even to police. Guess why you need to upgrade your phone that often? Not using a smartphone? Then Windows desktop will get it “for you” via their “telemetry”. And what’s left is readily disclosed via Facebook, Google and Apple all of which gather data on you and sell to the highest bidder. For governments it’s the “chef’s special” free lunch I believe.
Crossing some borders, I’ve heard, they already ask to unlock your phone for examination. But “one should not worry if he’s not doing anything criminal,” of course! This joke is my favorite!!
Will Firearms Licenses soon be dependent on passing a political beliefs test ? Yes, current trend indicates, so.
A while ago, a British holder of a Firearms Certificate, dared to criticize U.K. gun laws on his youtube channel. His Firearms Certificate was revoked for such political blasphemy. Canada’s illiberal Trudeau Liberal government follows a Marxist-Leninism, now call Cult.-Marxism/post-modernism. Whereby, every possible identity group, including those who belong to more than one, are in a power struggle to the death with each other. Once labelled a class enemy, as identity groups replace the failed class conflict of worker/capitalist, the punishment is to be cancelled. To be socially, politically, culturally and economically shunned, shut-out. It’s a variant of being sent to the Gulag.
The main obstacle to this being overtly added to the P.A.L. process is the objection by some of the provincial governments, ones where rural culture/Common-Law Rights, still holds some respect and power.
Add in that most of the morbidity/mortality of the Chinese Communist Party virus, affects the oldest among us. Liberty, property and standing on guard for thee is a tradition soon to be weakened yet again. Only a minority remember, when being citizens meant having rights/responsibilities (to defend those rights); rather than the 21st Century fashion of having privileges granted capriciously and serfdom, by decree.
Within ten years or so, only provincial independence or failing that, separation will be able to counter-balance the current federal trend to totalitarianism. General citizen disarmament is political logic ever since C-68 declared simple peaceful possession of a firearm to be a criminal offence.
I’ve noticed self-censorship, abandonment of freedom of speech take hold among both P.A.L. and non-P.A.L. holders. , post Sept. 11, 2001, that has only accelerated.