Meanwhile banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns.
I feel like there's just so much in the state now, we need mandatory sunset on anything like this.
Review of legislation and rules/regulation should be routine, rather than boutique, and each time we should be called upon to make a positive case for each rule.
Okay okay, technically it didn't apply since there was no authority, though it shows the haste involved in producing the list. It also appeared to include a plastic toy-grade BB gun, because a PMC once imprinted a similar name on a private batch of firearms that were never sold or imported into Canada.
Furthermore, apparently the firearm used in the shooting that prompted this sweeping ban was never sold on the Canadian market. It was illegally purchased, illegally smuggled into Canada, and you know, illegally discharged to kill people.
There is no connection between the Canadian domestic market for semi-automatic rifles and the shooting, and yet the resultant rules target only the Canadian domestic market for semi-automatic rifles.
Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle. Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets.
If anything would help it would be heavily restricting access to ammo. I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them.
> Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle.
I struggle with statements like this. I’m in the prairies. You know what semi-automatic rifles are great for? Predator control. As an easy example from two weeks ago, a pack of coyotes came into my in-laws farm yard and started attacking the sheep. Would a bolt action rifle work? Sure, but significantly less effectively.
> Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets.
Are you referring to the 10kJ rule? Or just in general? It’s always tough to tell where someone’s actual understanding of these things is, versus misconceptions. Supersonic bullets are absolutely necessary for hunting game, as are “large mass” bullets (although 10kJ is not generally necessary for the game you’ll encounter around here).
The vast majority of the rifles that were recently prohibited fired low-mass high-velocity bullets. In many provinces, those bullets were not allowed for hunting because they did not have sufficient energy to reliably kill wild game.
> If anything would help it would be heavily restricting access to ammo. I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them.
You’re talking about people who are already in possession of a smuggled handgun, and you can’t conjure up a way for them to get ammunition?
Ammunition is currently regulated the same way firearms are: you have to have a firearms license, after having taken a course and been vetted by the RCMP. The people who are causing the vast majority of (non-suicide) firearms death in this country are not people who give a crap about the firearms licensing regime.
> Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets.
Even assuming you could make it such that criminals only get ahold of small subsonic ammunition, that would not have a marked effect on the lethality of criminal acts committed with firearms, and likely would have no impact on the rate of wrongful homicide.
> I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them.
Manufacturing and/or smuggling ammunition is easy, and most criminals do not go through a lot of ammunition. In places where smuggling is restricted successfully, criminals find other ways to kill and intimidate people, including manufacturing firearms and explosives; which, it may surprise you, is pretty easy, and pretty easy to do without getting caught. If you want to commit the resources to monitor every machine shop in the Americas and build a trillion dollar system of fences and surveillance outposts between jurisdictions, be my guest though.
> Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle
Why do you think you know that?
In a free society, the law should not be concerned with defining what is permitted, but with determining what is impermissible. To determine what the law should prohibit, it is not sufficient to ask yourself whether the law would inconvenience you.
When you make laws, you have to be ready to put people in prison for disobeying them, you have to be ready to look their families in the eye and say “I think your father/son/mother/daughter should not be free for the next ten to fifteen years because he possessed the wrong shaped metal object”.
There are many, many people in Canada who are guilty of no malum in se conduct, yet illegally possess firearms simply because they would rather risk the legal ramifications of keeping them than destroy them simply to satisfy the law.
You're going to have to tell me that every time the law sends such a peaceful person to prison and destroys their property, it is worth it. It is no more just to imprison people who possess firearms for their own lawful purposes than it is to imprison people who possess drugs for the same.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I thought down voting because of viewpoint disagreement was discouraged on HN.
The recent CA gun rules are a knee jerk reaction that will not make anyone safer. It will however further Trudeau's goal of disarming law abiding citizens.
I feel like there's just so much in the state now, we need mandatory sunset on anything like this.
Review of legislation and rules/regulation should be routine, rather than boutique, and each time we should be called upon to make a positive case for each rule.