Several signs indicate the federal Liberal government is contemplating a total ban on guns, or at the very least a two-headed ban – one banning handguns and “assault rifles” everywhere and another banning all guns from urban areas.

Polls favourable to the idea of an all-out urban ban have been released. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has asked his crime reduction minister, Bill Blair, to examine the possibility of confiscating all the scary-looking guns in Canada “while not impeding the lawful use of firearms by Canadians.”

Stories from inside the Liberal caucus have even “leaked” claiming Liberal MPs from rural ridings are onboard.

The mission is to create political momentum for a ban.

Also, while both bans would be entirely useless in controlling crime, they are exactly the kind of politically correct, we-care, virtue-signalling act the Trudeau government loves.

What’s more, the Lib war room is convinced urban bans would be big vote-winners in major centres that are critical to their re-election, such as Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. And there is a federal election coming in October 2019.

But understand this, such bans would only be symbolic. They would only inconvenience/punish law-abiding guns owners. If the Liberals ban handguns and assault rifles, or if they ban all urban guns, then for sure the only people who will have guns will be the bad guys.

I suspect the Libs will eventually come up with some sort of compromise, such as a very convoluted central storage system consisting of government warehouses at which law-abiding gun owners are compelled to store their hunting rifles and target-shooting guns.

Yet even if they go that route, the maxim above still applies: The only people with guns will be the bad guys – or at least the only people who will have quick access to their guns.

My point is not that we can control crime by letting more civilians have guns for self-defence. Instead, my point is that it is wrong for any government to score feel-good points by restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens who are not the source of the problem at hand.

The tradesmen and hardware store clerks who like to hunt ducks in the fall will comply with whatever ban or restriction the Liberals come up with. But they are no threat to the public safety to begin with.

The surgeon who relieves stress by target shooting at a range twice a month (and I know one who does) will (begrudgingly) let the government take his pistols for safekeeping because he and Canada’s three million other law-abiding gun owners are just that … law-abiding.

But because they are already law-abiding, Canada’s legal gun owners are not the problem. So clamping down on them will not solve whatever crime problem the Liberals think they are solving.

Conversely, bans won’t stop bad guys from getting guns and using them.