No. Only restricted weapons. To buy a long gun, you show your firearms license, plunk down your money, and walk out the door with your gun. I haven’t bought one for a long, long time, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some kind of waiting period now, but I don’t think so.
For handguns, I should mention that it is almost impossible for a private citizen to get a carry permit, whether concealed or not. Even security guards generally can’t get them. There are a very small number of jobs that will allow you to carry a gun, and I think they usually involve the transport of large amounts of money (ie Brinks guard). So just the act of carrying a handgun to a potential crime is in itself a crime.
Exactly. Passing laws to stop 7-sigma outlier events is not a good use of time or social capital.
Usually we describe bullet power as the number of ft.lbs of energy the bullet can release on impact, or the amount of kinetic energy at the muzzle if we want to take distance out of the equation.
Handgun rounds are almost always much, much lower in power than rifle rounds. For example, a 9mm pistol has a kinetic energy at the muzzle on the order of 450 joules. An AR-15 has about 1800 joules of energy at the muzzle. But a .308 hunting rifle has 3200 joules, and a 12 ga shotgun can have 4500 joules of energy, or ten times that of a 9mm handgun. And no one wants to ban shotguns.
I hope you’ll pardon me if I comment that op-eds by advocacy groups printed in the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star are not necessarily representative of popular opinion across the country.
Pleased to be of service. My general mantra in discussing matters of public policy is facts first, as accurate as possible, then discussion of opinions and policy options.
Rifles are vastly more powerful than handguns. Even a medium-powered rifle is lethal hundreds of metres out, and most rifles can penetrate light armor and material of similar consistency. Medium rifles will easily defeat most light bulletproof vests.
Shotguns can also be very powerful, but by their nature have limited range.
Handguns are the least powerful and their practical range is very short as compared to rifles. Most standard handguns cannot be accurately aimed beyond fifty metres and their force falls off quickly.
True, but the value of handguns is their portability and concealment, which is why they are used for violent crimes much more than long-guns.
When you’re standing behind the counter in a store and a guy pulls a handgun on you, the fact that it has a much shorter range than a rifle is irrelevant. You’re standing within its range and aim.
That is the big question. For example, it was said that the police could check the registry before they went into a dwelling house to see if there were guns there.
But then, I remember hearing from cops on the beat that they always assumed there could be guns in a house when they went in, especially for domestic violence cases, and wouldn’t rely on the registry. Plus, that argument assumes that everyone is law-abiding and will have registered their guns. Overall, they said they’d start with the presumption there were guns, rather then be complacent because of a computer check.
Especially if they know that a significant number of gun owners did 't register their guns, and you can assume that gun owners involved in sketchy stuff the cops might be serving a warrant for are much more likely to not have registered their guns.
then there’s the other side of it: Legitimate gun owners argued that if the cops know they have guns, they might be more likely to shoot first and ask later if they got spooked by something.
What do you mean when you say “Europe”? Are the crime rates increasing because of only certain places seeing more crime or are they across the board? When have they started increasing, or are you saying they always have? How do different countries compare? How rapid is the crime rate decreasing in the US, and how does it compare to the same time frame in Europe? What were the baseline crimes rates?
Besides a recent Coronavirus related increase, I don’t find any evidence of a “rapid” increase in cime in Europe across the board in recent years but a general decrease since at least 2007.
Prohibited firearms are, as the name suggests, not legal for members of the public to possess, except in very rare circumstances. Anyone in possession of a prohibited weapon without the necessary permit is committing a federal criminal offence.
Note as well that this Schedule is not exhaustive. For example, any fully automatic firearm, defined as being able to fire more than one bullet with a single pull of the trigger, is automatically (!) a prohibited firearm. The full list is set out by the definition of “prohibited firearm” in s. 84(1) of the ‘‘Criminal Code’’:
TL;DR - I never had the RCMP receive, store, test, or handle any of my firearms at any time. The rest of this post, are differences in experience, and some expansion or clarification of Sam’s points.
I obtained my R-PAL (Restricted Possession and Acquisition License) for work several years before I purchased my first handgun, so there was a touch less back and forth. It was also when we had to obtain a separate ATT (Authorization To Transport) for moving restricted firearms (more on that in a moment).
I joined the local gun club & range. There are two valid reasons for owning restricted firearms (pistols, short barrelled rifles, and prescribed firearms): collecting and target practice. If you don’t belong to a facility that allows for the legal discharge of restricted firearms you have no valid reason to own a restricted firearm for target practice.
I then went to the local gun store and selected and paid for the pistol I wanted. The gun store started the transfer process with the government and set aside the pistol for later pick-up. The government, well the Chief Firearms Office (CFO), over the course of weeks, requested that I apply for a long term ATT (Authorization to Transport) for the firearm for target shooting, and supply proof of membership to the shooting range. Once the ATT was approved (blanket permission to transport to the range, to a border crossing, to a gunsmith for repair, or to a peace officer for verification or destruction, any firearm registered to my address), the transfer of ownership was completed.
I then had to apply for a separate short-term ATT to transport the firearm from the store to my home. I also had wait an additional two weeks after that to receive the new registration certificate (It is illegal to transport the firearm without a copy of its registration certificate, the short term ATT to bring it home from the store is an exemption).
Once the registration cert arrived, I could safely and legally transport my new pistol to and from the range (unloaded and trigger locked, in a rigid, opaque, securely locked case), with its ammunition (in a separate container). So the purchase process took at least a month to six weeks. Later purchases generally complete(d) faster (2-3 weeks) depending on the load at the CFO.
I did not need to take it to the police for inspection, test firing, or ballistic profiling.
Now its been a minute since I purchase my last restricted, it was about 6 months before the Ruger MK IV came out (I bought a Mk III), so the requirements may have changed since then. For instance, the separate long term ATT was made a part of the R-PAL license itself to reduce paperwork, and then the new government vowed to revert it back to two seperate documents as a “safety measure”.
Yeah, When I first applied for a license it took about 6 months for approval, it took a letter indicating a requirement for work to help expedite it. In BC, the membership waits, in my experience, are a little shorter, but there may be a delay in getting the safety orientation to get your membership card. In Ontario (where I first got my license), the Gun Club had to send the ATT requests on the members’ behalf. That really delayed things.
And that’s why the process takes so very long, and is expensive.
Again there are subtleties here. There is no Canadian legal definition of gun safe. But the regulation states:
Ah magazine restrictions: As a general rule, semiauto handguns are limited to no more than ten rounds of the ammunition they are designed for. Semiauto centerfire rifles are restricted to five rounds (with one or two exceptions by statute, M1 Garands can take 8 round enbloc clips, e.g.). Rimfire rifles do not have limits except where the rifle magazine will fit a hand gun, in which case the 10 round limit applies. An overcapacity magazine is a prohibited device. If you are caught with one, it will cost you your license, your guns, and up to five years in the hoosegow.
I’ll leave out the some of the fun work arounds based on caliber games, availability of rifle caliber pistols. or bolt-actions with magazines that can be made to work in their semi-auto cousins.
At which they fail miserably, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well. The first and foremost impact of gun laws is always on the people whom they aren’t needed for. And “should not have them” is a value judgment unless you’re talking about people who have been adjudicated felons or incompetent, for which there are already laws.
Swap out “Canadian gun laws” with “United States Prohibition laws” and you have the situation back in the 1920s.
I’m not sure that I get it. I thought those types of weapons were already prohibited or significantly restricted. Are they getting rid of the grandfathered versions or now you can’t have one at all, even if you complied with other restrictions like a five-round magazine?
Banning ‘guns that have been used in mass shootings’ is like banning blue cars because a murderer drove over people in a blue car.
I noticed right away that one of the guns now banned is the Ruger Mini-14. This is not an ‘assault weapon’. It’s a ranch rifle that is extremely popular with farmers and ranchers for things like pest control. It looks like a normal hunting rifle, and does not have a pistol grip or any of that stuff. It’s also pretty expensive - around $1500, which makes it less likely to be used by a random person than any number of still-legal rifles. Also, it fires the .223 round. which is about half as powerful as the more common .308 hunting round, which is fired by many guns not affected by the ban.
As far as I can tell, it is on the list mainly because a crazy person used one to kill some people, not because the gun is any different than a hundred other semi-auto rifles that will still be legal.
That’s just factually wrong, as evidenced by the extremely high number of gun-related deaths in the US per capita compared to any other advanced democracy on earth.
I would, however, slightly rephrase the original comment that the purpose of gun laws is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. That’s true, at its core, but the side effect is that the application and background check process is far more rigorous than anywhere in the US, and even more so for restricted weapons like handguns, so the whole gun culture is entirely different in Canada resulting in fewer guns in circulation. Where there are fewer guns, there is less chance of misuse, where even “law-abiding” people can succumb to the impulsive effects of anger, alcohol, or the many other things that afflict our emotions as human beings and cloud our rationality.
I’m glad to see Trudeau taking fast and decisive action on this. It’s reminiscent of the rapid response by Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand after the mass shooting there, and in Australia years before that. Unfortunately we live right next to a global epicenter of gun violence.
Canada has 37.5 guns per 100 people. The U.S. has about 120. If guns were what mattered to murder rates, Canada would be a really violent place. Canada has the same murder rate as Belgium, despite having three times the number of guns per capita, about the same ratio as between Canada and the U.S.
Banning guns will have no effect on murder rates. It WILL harm the rights of millions of people. This is the worst kind of legislation: feel-good policies which have no practical effect but which increase cynicism and opposition to government policies in general, making it harder to do things that actually matter.
I do support the extra border controls, extra policing and enforcement of gun crimes. Those may actually help.
I fully support the ban and I’m looking forward to the handgun legislation. I hope a lot of cities will take advantage of it to ban handguns. I would favor a total ban and then carve out the logical exceptions that are needed out of real necessity. The gun advocates kind of did this to themselves by fighting so hard against the gun registry. The Canadian National Firearm Association’s slogan is “No compromise.” It really said everything that needs to be said about gun advocacy. There will be no compromise on any gun control that even inconveniences a gun owner. So, a ban was inevitable.
Define “nobody”. Like in terms of stats, polling, etc. Because from what I can see, people (aside from gun nuts and rabid Trudeau haters who will never acknowledge him doing something good) generally applaud this policy.
Which rights will this law “harm”? The right to own assault rifles? Is that a particular right enshrined in the constitution? We don’t have the equivalent of the second amendment, yet this isn’t even a blanket gun ban. So what “rights” do you speak of?
Yes, extra border controls and policing will buttress this law since the majority of these weapons are smuggled in from the states, I agree. The question is, ¿por que no los dos?
