Well, the difference here is that it's not being advocated as some kind of god-given right sent on down from the mountaintop on graven tablets (THAT would be American). He's just pointing out that yeah plenty of Canadians do in fact use guns regularly "Yeah, I need to use a gun, I like using guns, and my family has used guns for a long time." and that Canada, being a rural country for the bulk of its existence has a higher proportion of such people than say, The Netherlands. Or Monaco.
I have too many prairie-province relatives to dismiss gun ownership as "Un-Canadian". Nor did I ever really think the registry was that great of a thing in the first place. The only reason I even thought it was OKAY, was because the cops said it was useful (but then, cops will ALWAYS say that about stuff like this) and because the unwillingness to register just seemed more like rifle-owners being really whiny (awwww I don't WANNA). It's not like there was any actual restriction placed on gun owners aside from the registration being recorded somewhere.
I don't think you're going to like Justin regardless, so this is hardly an attempt on my part to defend him.
Maybe it's because I live in Ontario, where the only thing that ever happens is someone gets elected to destroy whatever it was the last guy did and then one day you wake up and nobody has done anything for you at any level of government in thirty years. So maybe gun control is a good point or a bad point, but damned if I'm not okay with someone not wanting to waste their time trying to re-fight the battles over relatively minor stuff which have already been lost.
And I'll be double-damned if I'm not happy to see someone who actually has a ghost of a chance of unseating Stephen Harper.
