Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced Monday a proposed freeze on handgun possession in Canada that could successfully ban their importation and sale, following current mass shootings withinside the United States.
The invoice ought to nonetheless be surpassed through Parliament, with the ruling Liberals preserving simplest a minority of seats.
“We’re introducing rules to enforce a countrywide freeze on handgun possession,” Trudeau instructed a information conference, joined through dozens of households and buddies of sufferers of gun violence.
“What this indicates is that it’ll not be viable to buy, sell, switch or import handguns everywhere in Canada,” he said. “In different words, we are capping the marketplace for handguns.”
Days after Canada’s worst mass capturing left 23 lifeless in rural Nova Scotia in April 2020, the authorities banned 1,500 varieties of military-grade or assault-fashion firearms.
But Trudeau recounted Monday that gun violence maintains to rise.
The authorities statistical employer mentioned closing week that firearms-associated violent crimes account for much less than 3 percentage of all violent crimes in Canada.
But considering the fact that 2009 the in line with capita price of weapons being pointed at a person has almost tripled, whilst the price at which a gun changed into fired with an rationale to kill or wound is up 5-fold.
Almost two-thirds of gun crimes in city regions concerned handguns.
Police frequently factor to smuggling from the United States — that’s reeling from current shootings at a college in Texas and at a grocery store in New York state — as the principle supply of handguns.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino envisioned there are approximately 1,000,000 handguns on this country — up considerably from a decade ago.
Trudeau commented, “People need to be loose to visit the grocery store, their college or their location of worship with out fear. People need to be loose to visit the park or to a birthday celebration with out traumatic approximately what would possibly take place from a stray bullet.
“Gun violence is a complicated problem,” he said. “But on the stop of the day, the mathsematics is certainly pretty simple: the less the weapons in our communities, the more secure every body will be.”
The proposed regulation could additionally strip everyone concerned in home violence or stalking in their firearms license, and get rid of weapons from the ones deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, in addition to enhance border protection and crook consequences for gun trafficking.
It could additionally ban long-gun magazines able to preserving greater than 5 bullets