This is what it would look like if Canada banned all handguns
If history is any guide, Canadians could keep their handguns but wouldn't be allowed to buy any more
An unidentified man holds a Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol in Manassas, Virginia, 22 July, 2007.AFP PHOTO/Karen BLEIER/FILES
Tristin Hopper
September 5, 2018
At the end of last month it emerged that Bill Blair, the new minister of organized crime reduction, had been tasked by the Liberal government with examining a “full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada.” This follows weeks of calls from both Toronto and Montreal for a total handgun ban.
Handguns are indeed the primary weapon behind a well-publicized surge in Toronto gun violence. There are also more than one million Canadian handguns legally held in private hands, the vast majority of which will spend their entire lives cutting tiny holes in paper targets.
Canadian handgun bans have been proposed before, most notably by then prime minister Paul Martin in 2005. But what would it look like if a Canadian government ever did it for real?
Existing handguns would probably be grandfathered in
Canada bans guns relatively frequently. In 1998, the same federal law that introduced the gun registry also banned pistols with a muzzle length of less than 4.1 inches (105 mm). The RCMP also has unilateral power to immediately ban the sale of any firearm for any reason, such as in 2014
when it did so with a semi-automatic rifle called the Swiss Arms Classic Green, or in February when it did so
with the CZ Bren. In all those cases, guns are simply reclassified as being “
prohibited,” which means that they were banned for sale or import, but could still be possessed by people who already owned them. There are countries, most notably Australia, that have accompanied gun bans with massive government buyback schemes to immediately clear a class of firearms from the private market. But Canada almost always takes the less-controversial “grandfathering” route. Thus, if the federal government ever engineered a total handgun ban, the likely result is that handguns would disappear from store shelves while existing handgun owners would be able to hold on to their collections. As an example take the Walther PPK, the pistol famous as James Bond’s preferred sidearm. It was reclassified as prohibited by the 1998 ban on short-muzzled pistols, but any Canadian who was already registered to own a PPK was permitted to keep it. Now, when a Canadian PPK owner dies, the pistol must either be sold to someone else with a pre-1998 licence — or be surrendered to law enforcement for destruction.
A Walther PPK, effectively banned in Canada unless you owned one before 1998. File
A ban wouldn’t make it any more or less illegal to carry a gun around
In the United States, municipal handgun bans have occasionally been proposed as an easy way to spot and bust armed criminals. With open or concealed carry legal across much of the United States, it’s difficult for American police to immediately determine if a man with a gun is simply an armed citizen or a criminal. But Canadian police don’t have that problem: Any handgun is a “restricted” firearm, which subjects it to way tougher rules than for a standard hunting rifle. The only legal place to fire a handgun in Canada is on a registered range — and the gun can’t be transported to the range unless it’s unloaded, fitted with a trigger lock and the owner has been granted an “
Authorization to Transport” by the RCMP. Thus, ban or no ban, anybody walking around a Canadian city with a handgun on them is almost always a certifiable criminal. And if a gun owner so much as brings a pistol along on a hunting trip, they could be risking the seizure of their entire gun collection.
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This is all very illegal in Canada. Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images
It would probably stop Canadian-origin handguns from being used in crimes
Right now, a criminal somewhere is carrying a firearm that began life in a Canadian gun shop. In 2017, Toronto Police numbers show that of 726 crime guns seized, 148 were “domestically sourced.” One of the going methods is that a criminal gang finds someone with a clean record to take a firearms safety course and acquire a gun possession licence. That person then buys up a small arsenal and has it “accidentally” cleaned out in a break-in. This particular loophole would obviously disappear in a Canada without retail sales of pistols. However, it’s reasonable to assume that smuggled U.S. guns could quickly flood any gap in the black market. A
2008 study commissioned by the Government of British Columbia found that the “vast majority” of the province’s guns were coming from just across the border in Washington State.
Crime could well be unaffected
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, is a vocal opponent of the recent push for a handgun ban, saying last week that it would have “no impact.” McCormack isn’t a gun nut by any means; he told the National Post he’s “not against banning or prohibiting firearms in a way that’s going to impact public safety.” But when most of Toronto’s shootings are obviously gang-related, McCormack said the more immediate and effective strategy is more preventive police paired with programs to steer youth out of gangs. “We can ban handguns for any number of reasons,” added Christian Leuprecht, a crime policy researcher at both Queen’s University and Royal Military College, “but if we think it’s going to do anything about the violence then it’s not the policy measure to implement.”
If it did drive down crime, it could take a while
In 1997, in response to the massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school, the U.K. effectively banned private ownership of firearms. The next year, crimes involving guns went up — and continued going up for the rest of the decade. In 1997/1998, there were 12,805 offences in England and Wales involving a firearm. By 2001/2002, it was up to 22,401. “The short-term impact strongly suggests that there is no direct link between the unlawful use of handguns and their lawful ownership,” read a 2001 report from the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College, London. Fortunately, the long-term rate of British gun crime did eventually go down, with handgun crime now sitting at
roughly half what it once was. One particularly promising sign in recent years is that British criminals keep getting caught with antique firearms, such as the
Sussex drug dealer arrested in 2014 with a Victorian-era revolver. These are not the actions of criminals with easy access to guns. Meanwhile, the textbook example of a gun ban gone wrong is in Venezuela. The country banned all private ownership of guns in 2012, only to see homicides
continue to climb — particularly after the country’s economy began to completely unravel starting in 2015.
Cracking down on illegal firearms is always a little tricky when history’s largest weapons market is next door
Speaking of the U.K., it’s often cited alongside with Australia as a success story in gun control. Both those countries are also islands with famously strict border control policies. Canada, by contrast, shares a very long and very porous border with the most gun-saturated country in the history of human civilization. “All that’s going to happen is a displacement effect where we’re going to see more guns coming across the border,” said Leuprecht, who
has studied U.S.-Canadian gun smuggling pipelines. He said a standard method of cross-border smuggling is to fill up a box with guns, equip it with a GPS tracker and strap it to the bottom of a car with a Canadian licence plate parked near the U.S. border. Then, once the unwitting Canadian drives home, criminals follow the GPS and snatch the box from their driveway. “It is so easy to bring guns into this country,” Leuprecht said. The problem of U.S. guns is particularly well-known to Mexico. Famously, the country’s
sole gun store is located on a heavily guarded military base and can only be entered by citizens who have passed a detailed background check. Despite this, with
as many as 250,000 U.S. guns crossing the Mexican border annually, criminal gangs have had no trouble arming themselves for the country’s bloody years-long drug war.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canad...QjEgnmh3zB68TAT6lp6tQdhtP7JzcZiMji-pTSuM2DKVE
