Speaking in Montreal in December on the anniversary of that city’s 1989 Ecole Polytechnique shooting tragedy, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed his government’s plans to further restrict legal access to handguns and “assault weapons” and refused to rule out a “full ban” on handguns, the National Rifle Association reported.
One newspaper, citing an unnamed government official, states that “there are doubts that a ban will have the desired effect” – possibly because the existing law already contains a comprehensive ban on the possession of firearms without the necessary government licenses or authorizations. According to the government source, some of the options for additional restrictions include mandatory storage requirements that prohibit keeping such firearms at home, and expanded law enforcement powers to suspend licenses and criminalize gun owners.
A federal government “engagement paper” (Reducing Violent Crime: A Dialogue on Handguns and Assault Weapons), issued this fall by the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, identified other problems. The term “assault weapon” has no definite meaning and “is not a legally defined term in Canada’s firearms legislation.” Using a very loose definition of “assault weapon” as any semiautomatic gun “with a large magazine of ammunition” that is “designed and configured for rapid fire” would sweep in currently non-restricted firearms owned and used by Canadians for lawful activities: “in the context of sport shooting activities, because they form a part of a collection, or for hunting.” The paper acknowledges that while “most gun crimes are not committed with legally-owned firearms” and that “the vast majority” of gun owners are law abiding, nonetheless, “[a]ny ban of handguns or assault weapons would primarily affect legal firearms owners” with only an indirect effect on “the illicit market.”
The possibility of these additional new measures comes as the federal gun control bill, C-71, inches closer to becoming law. On Dec. 10, the bill received second reading in the Senate, on a 50-33 vote. Canada’s lawmakers took this opportunity to voice their concerns with—and opposition to— the bill.
Sen. Donald Neil Plett, a Manitoba Conservative, in his 4,700-word refutation of the claims underlying Bill C-71, characterized the measure as a sham: it gives the illusion of combatting gang violence while failing utterly to address this “very real” problem, while “cast[ing] a shadow over gun owners, suggesting they are somehow culpable for the tragic losses experienced by others through gun crime.”
Canada’s violent crimes are not the product of its licensed gun owners: the “lion’s share of our gun crime problem is criminals killing criminals and using guns to do it.” Citing a recently-released Statistics Canada report, Homicide in Canada, 2017, Plett observed that gang-related homicides represented a quarter of all homicides, with the gang-related homicide rate reaching the highest-ever recorded level since the agency began tracking this metric. Almost four out of five of these homicides were committed with a gun. Moreover, homicides had a significant common factor for both perpetrators and their victims: in 2017, two-thirds of adults accused of homicides, and more than half of the adult victims, had previous criminal records.
