The Canadian government announced on Friday, August 5, that it would ban the importation of handguns in an attempt to curb gun violence in the country. It’s about a “temporary ban” applied from August 19 to individuals and businesses, “until the entry into force of the national freeze”is it specified in a press release.
The bill could come into force in the fall. These weapons “have only one goal, to kill people”underlined the Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendicino, during a trip to Etobicoke, in the suburbs of Toronto.
The group PolySeSouvient, which represents survivors and families of victims of gun violence, welcomed a “significant and ground-breaking measure that will undoubtedly slow the expansion of the Canadian handgun market pending passage of the bill”.
For its part, the Canadian Coalition for Gun Rights (CCFR) called the announcement a “new abuse of process for political purposes”. “If the Liberal government really wanted to improve public safety, it would do everything possible to ban the illegal importation of handguns into Canada”said CCDF CEO Rod Giltaca.
Smuggling weapons from the United States
Instead, liberals “prohibit licensed and verified Canadians from legally owning handguns, which they have done for over a hundred years in Canada”, he added. Despite all the measures put in place by Ottawa to try to reduce armed violence, experts remain skeptical about their effectiveness, pointing to the smuggling of weapons from the United States as being the real problem.
On Wednesday, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) announced two major seizures in western Canada of“ghost guns”, which do not have a serial number and are difficult to trace. From 1is January 2019 to June 30, 2022, CBSA Pacific Region seized 581 firearms at ports of entry and in international mail shipments.
This announcement comes a few months after Justin Trudeau unveiled a plan in May for “national handgun ownership freeze” after the recent carnage in the United States, which killed twenty-one people in an elementary school in Texas and ten in a supermarket in New York State.
Mr. Trudeau’s statement then prompted Canadians to rush into arms stores which, with the influx, very quickly sold out their stocks. According to government estimates, there are over one million handguns in Canada, for a population of thirty-eight million people.
Between 2009 and 2021, it was the type of weapon that was used the most in homicides committed with a firearm (57% in 2021). Some 2,500 stores sell pistols in the country. The measure comes in the context of an upsurge in crimes related to firearms: this week three homicides were committed in the space of 24 hours in the Montreal region.