Politics & Power Quote by Steve Kanaly

Kanaly’s line has the soft-focus certainty of someone trying to lower the temperature without surrendering the room. “My focus” is a strategic narrowing: he’s not entering the moral war over guns, he’s stepping around it and offering a seemingly unassailable goal - safety - as common ground. It’s a classic public-figure move: define the debate in terms that make disagreement look unreasonable.

The subtext sits in the second clause. “Continue to enjoy them” treats firearms less as instruments of force than as a settled leisure culture - hunting, sport shooting, collecting, family tradition. “Enjoy” is doing a lot of work: it frames gun ownership as pleasure and identity, not just policy, and quietly suggests that the real threat is restriction. Safety becomes the acceptable face of preservation.

“Here in North America” widens the frame beyond the U.S. without naming its exceptional levels of gun violence. That phrasing gestures toward a shared continental culture while sidestepping the stark differences between American and Canadian gun regimes. It also keeps the statement from sounding like a partisan talking point; it’s regional, not ideological.

As an actor, Kanaly isn’t offering legislative specifics; he’s offering a posture. The intent is to reassure gun owners that their pastime and rights are being affirmed, while signaling to skeptics that responsibility is on the table. It works because it wraps a contested political reality in the language of normalcy: safety as a baseline, enjoyment as a birthright, and the status quo as the thing we’re simply trying to protect.