Automatic weapons are already essentially banned, Dr Paprika. Only automatic weapons that were legally owned prior to 1978 (? Too tired to check the exact date) can be purchased now, and only by passing several checks. It’s a closed class.
In the States, there are people who come out of the woodwork en masse after every big shooting to say that we should totally eliminate gun laws, because criminals won’t follow them anyway. I like to reply, “Then let’s eliminate all laws, why don’t we, because criminals won’t follow them.” Doesn’t always go over so well.
Gun laws, as I understand them, are mainly to keep firearms away from people who should not have them.
Pushing the gun law debate to the side; western alienation is strictly Alberta/prairie right-wing grievance which, in turn, makes separatist sentiment a literal joke.
Liberals will liberal. Get over it. The whining always stops whenever there’s a Tory House, but since they can’t win non-stop dictatorships the whines always come back. “We’ll set up our own country without Liberals!”
Also I do agree with Sam Stone’s analysis that western alienation and separatist sentiment will rise, but I’m not limiting it to just Gun laws. It raises anytime any Liberal gains control of the House.
IMO that’s like getting angry at the Sun for (inevitably) raising every morning from the east.
You might want to wait for oil to get above zero dollars/barrel before you separate.
It would be difficult to make gun laws enforceably stricter than they are now; a large percentage of gun crimes are committed with weapons smuggled in from the USA as it is.
Owning automatic weapons, as noted upthread, is, legally speaking, pretty much impossible.
This isn’t my area of expertise. Trudeau has always mentioned “military style” weapons, a vague descriptor. New Zealand banned many semi-automatics and some guns which carried more than ten rounds and placed restrictions on ammunition sales and licenses. Since New Zealand is a country of farmers, in some ways it has similarities to Canada.
So my questions:
- What should Canada do?
- Are any guns which were banned in New Zealand legal here?
- How would banning what they did in New Zealand affect hunters and gun owners in practice, apart from seeming oppressive and Draconian and an overreach of state authority offensive to law abiding libertarians (with whom I sympathize).
- Is a gun registry needed, or possible? How could it go through so much money and fail?
- What measures would make a bigger difference to reducing “hard to prevent” crimes, accepting changing gun laws might not have changed the outcome much?
Taking a quick skim at the New Zealand gun law page on the wikipedia, I’m actually not seeing much difference between their laws and ours, and ours already are more restrictive in some areas than the NZ laws.
You need a licence to acquire a centre-fire semi auto rifle or shotgun in New Zealand; here, need a licence, period, regardless of type of ammunition.
Restrictions on the allowable magazine size - Canadian restrictions seem tighter here already, as the NZ law categorises rifles with more than 10 cartridge magazines as restricted, requiring a special endorsement on the licence; Canadian law prohibits magazines over that size.
Restrictions on military style assault rifles - both countries have that, to varying degrees.
The largest problem with Canadian guns laws is that Canada shares a very long border with a nation without them, which is out of Canada’s control. Gun crime is taken very seriously already, and the balance of restrictions vs legal ownership by farmers & hunters is pretty good already, though not perfect. (I’m for much stricter controls.)
What stricter controls would you like to see?
The magazine limit in Canada is five to ten, depending on the weapon.
Banning types of guns isn’t the solution to improving the rate of gun violence; most gun violence is committed with already-banned weapons, and the range of legal weapons is quite limited.
What works is intelligent enforcement. I am honestly not sure if the disaster in Nova Scotia was stoppable, but the great majority of gun violence isn’t a single lunatic on a spree. You could further reduce gun violence through greater investigative work and better cooperation between agencies; the question is whether that’s practical, I guess, but it’s an opportunity for improvement.
The laws are broadly similar.
Honestly, I am not sure if a gun registry would make much of a difference. It would help with investigating a crime, but the number of cases where it would make a difference is very small; it would specifically have to be a crime committed with a legally own and registered firearm that would otherwise not have been solveable. How often does that happen in Canada?
As to why the registry was a fiasco, that’s a long story. The basic thrust of it, though, is that the government of the day came up with the idea before anyone had really thought of the practical side of how to do it. There were several problems with it:
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The initial cost estimate of $2 million was insane. It was flatly dishonest of anyone to even suggest such a preposterous number; the likelihood the government could implement a national firearms registry from such a low sum was exactly zero. A ridiculous budget is essentially the same as no budget at all, so once it blew past that number the project took on the property of ALL projects with an unlimited budget; it became unlimitedly expensive.
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The technology of the time was not up to the task of doing something that big that quickly. That might sound weird - I mean, the province keep track of God only knows how many drivers’ licenses and health cards, and the feds run the income tax program and whatnot. But that stuff is all built year over year. The feds were trying to register 10-20 MILLION firearms from scratch, and to impose order on a thing that was not systemic in any way.
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Gun owners had no compelling reason to bother registering existing weapons. If you’re a law abiding person with an old .22 at the cottage, you just had zero reason to cooperate on an individual level - the law was hopelessly unenforceable - or a social responsibility level, because the simple fact is that very few gun crimes in Canada are committed by people who own the weapon legally.
One of the proposed benefits to the registry was that it would offer the police a degree of safety; for instance, if a couple of cops had to attend to a domestic violence call, they could check the computer to see if weapons were registered at the home. But that is of benefit only if it’s more or less universally effective. If you don’t catch most guns, then it’s useless, or maybe WORSE than useless; if the police officer trusts the computer they might walk into a situation with a gun they did not know was there.
It was apparent very early on that the registry was a fiasco. It survived as long as it did only out of sheer politics.
No one wants to hear this, but the connection between gun ownership and the murder rate, while there is a positive correlation, isn’t as strong as one might think. Furthermore, if you want to reduce gun violence, you don’t start with rifles and shotguns; you start with HANDGUNS, which are the real plague when it comes to both homicides and suicides. And we’ve already made handgun ownership almost legally impossible.
I don’t know enough for an informed opinion. My dislike for guns and love of animals both tilt towards the extremes, so I’m just assuming that there’s a way to tighten things further and that I would be happy with that.
Perhaps when the details of this horrific crime are clear, it will reveal a loophole that needs closing? Just guessing!
This is not my area of expertise. I would like to see fewer tragic incidents.
If guns can’t be better controlled, perhaps there is value in (1) more regulation of ammunition sales or alternate registry of ammunition purchases (2) mandated training or competency testing at some regular interval (3) some sort of note from a family member or guarantor vouching for mental stability at some regular interval.
I’m not a fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. I don’t know if that is too much or if it would make a difference. I like animals and dislike tragedies. A gun registry may be flawed on many levels, but wasn’t it supported by the Canadian Police Chiefs? That implies they must have some benefit?
I would also prefer to see Parliament back in session at a stressful time when big decisions must be made and potential problems must be avoided. They can work out some distancing thing. If a grocery store can manage, in my view so can government.
Sittings of Parliament can take place remotely. There is no need to put all the members in a room together sitting side by side.
Yes and no. We want healthy politicians and we need them to make the best decisions at a difficult phase. Regular meetings signifies a desire to normalize things, leadership, conscientiousness and maybe a degree of debate.
I like Trudeau. I think he has done a good job on many difficult files. I think he will likely win the next election. I sense he sees a political advantage in not meeting since the federal opposition is almost invisible and people largely approve of his performance compared to other countries. I think Doug Ford has done a surprisingly good job as well.
But they’ll have to meet eventually. Sooner rather than later. I would agree a lot of what happens in parliament is probably fodder for public consumption rather than real debate. But I am confident this will change within the next sesquicentennial.
Regular meetings can take place remotely.
The Rules of the Parliament do not currently allow for that. To amend the rules, the two Houses have to be summoned under the existing Rules and pass an amendment to permit remote participation.
So would we all. But we need to use principles like epidemiology to determine what changes would actually work, coupled with measures that will have popular support. The gun registry became a lightning rod for those who opposed gun control, and in my opinion has made it harder to enact further gun control regulation. Overreach can be as bad as insufficient measures, if the overreach then makes it harder to do anything.
Our gun control laws are already pretty strict. I doubt that they would survive a 2nd Amendment/Heller challenge in the US system.
Purchase of ammunition is already regulated. You need to have a PAL (“Purchase and Acquisition Licence”) to buy ammunition. That is the same licence you need to buy a gun, and is a pretty stringent test. Here’s what you need to get a PAL, as set out in the Firearms Regulations:
I don’t see the value of a registry of purchases, if someone already has to have gone through the hoops to get a PAL. What value add do you think it would have?
That would be the five year renwal for a PAL, which is very similar to the initial process for getting a PAL in the first place.
The purpose of these provisions isn’t to test competnency or training, but whether the person poses any risk. The police can call the spouses/former spouses for background checks.
I think this would be a really bad idea. If a person has a tendency to domestic violence, would their spouse or family member want to be asked that question? What would a battered spouse say to the police, in writing: “Yes, officer, my spouse is very violent.”? There would be great pressure on a spouse or family member in that situation to sign the letter dictated by the applicant for the renewal.
Instead, the applicant has to give the contact info for all spouses and former spouses, and the police do their own investigation.