Canada is currently carrying out the most expensive and complex gun control push ever mounted, with all of it done for the explicit purpose of preventing mass shootings.
And yet, the entire campaign ignored the one safeguard that would likely have prevented the Tumbler Ridge massacre: Removing firearms from the home of a mentally ill individual.
This safeguard is already a longstanding feature of Canadian firearms law, and is arguably the one policy that most differentiates Canadian gun control from its U.S. equivalent.
The RCMP, distinct from any single U.S. law enforcement agency, retains extraordinary powers to unilaterally confiscate firearms even upon the barest suspicion that an individual within a gun-owning household is a risk to themselves or others.
As is emerging now, this safeguard actually appears to have kicked in in the case of the Tumbler Ridge killer, only to be reversed before the massacre? At a Wednesday press conference, RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said that police had attended the home of the alleged shooter on “multiple occasions” for mental health calls. This included more than one instance in which the suspect was taken into custody under the terms of the Mental Health Act.
“Police have attended that residence in the past, approximately a couple of years ago, where firearms were seized,” said McDonald. He added, “I can say that at a later point in time the lawful owner of those firearms petitions for those firearms to be returned and they were.” According to other media accounts, the petitioner was someone in the shooter’s family and the guns were returned just weeks before the massacre.
Under the Criminal Code of Canada, Canadian law enforcement can
seize legal firearms without a warrant, provided that an officer believes that it’s in the “interests of the safety of the person or any other person” to do so. It’s a uniquely robust version of what U.S. gun control advocates would call a “red flag law.” And even watered-down versions of the Canadian system have been linked to thwarted mass-shootings in the U.S.
So instead of enforcing the existing laws, after 2020 the singular gun control focus of the Liberal government became a series of mass-bans of specific models of firearms. The federal government imposed an overnight ban on thousands of previously legal firearms on May 1, 2020, framing it as a direct reaction to the Nova Scotia mass shooting that had happened two weeks prior…not using legally owned firearms but weapons smuggled in from the US.
This would be followed up with additional firearm bans, and a 2022 “freeze” on the sale or transfer of legal handguns.
The Tumbler Ridge shooting occurred just weeks after the formal kickoff of the Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program, the long-delayed federal program attempting to “buy back” firearms covered by the 2020 ban.
A leading criticism of the bans was that the Nova Scotia shooting was committed with illegal firearms, and thus could not have been prevented with curbs on legal ownership, but this wasn’t about stopping actual real gun crime, but creating criminals out of legal gun owners.
The “assault-style” definition also primarily targeted firearms based on appearance, rather than functionality, meaning that multiple firearms made the list despite having the same caliber and firing ability as firearms that remained legal, but that’s the Liberal way.
Firearms were removed by police from the shooter's house, only to be returned just before the massacre
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