The provincial governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan also explicitly opposed the changes this week, even announcing legal action. Bill C-21 would prevent the purchase, sale, transfer or importation of handguns, although people who already legally possess handguns can still use them. The Alberta government has accused the federal government of intending to “completely ban legal gun ownership” after the Liberals quietly introduced a surprising 11-hour change that would be the largest gun ban in Canadian legislative history. “These changes do nothing to target the illegal use of firearms and further highlight the rift between the federal Liberal government and legal gun owners in Saskatchewan and across Canada,” Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said in a statement. The original rifle contained 10 rounds of ammunition, but those sold in Canada were modified to accommodate only five rounds, the legal maximum quantity for centre-firing semi-automatic long guns. Alberta Attorney General Tyler Shandro called the decision evidence that “the federal government is clearly seeking a complete ban on legal gun ownership.” There are also recent incidents. In 2016, a gunman armed with an SKS rifle burst into a home in Courtenay, British Columbia, killing Leanne Larocque and Gordon Turner. The following year, Constable John Davidson was murdered by a man armed with an SKS rifle in a parking lot in British Columbia. That same year, Lionel Desmond legally purchased an SKS rifle and then killed his wife, daughter and mother. And in 2019, two teenagers legally bought an SKS rifle in British Columbia, killing three people and triggering a massive manhunt until they committed suicide. Unfortunately, the new ban, which makes it illegal to acquire 1,500 variants of weapons, is not exactly what it seems. It remains unclear whether the SKS was legal and whether police knew the 23-year-old shooter was armed.
As cynical as it may be to keep this particular model legal while advocating banned weapons, the SKS isn`t the only semi-automatic that isn`t on the new banned list, which is cheap and in which you can load multiple cartridges and fire them quickly. Far from it. It is also a massive expansion of gun control legislation that was originally primarily designed to prevent the sale of Canadian handguns. The documentation accompanying the first draft of Bill C-21 made no mention of plans for legally owned long guns. The Progressive Conservative government of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, led by then-Attorney General Kim Campbell, passed legislation banning high-capacity magazines for semi-automatic rifles. The Progressive Conservatives also banned or restricted some semi-automatic rifles, although others, including the Mini-14, remained unrestricted. Sign up to receive daily best stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. In 1982, Saskatoon police shot and killed an 18-year-old hostage-taker after a lengthy altercation. The shooter was dressed in fatigue and armed with an AR-15. He fired 50 shots during the altercation and pulled a finger from his hostage.
“It`s still not a ban on assault weapons,” said Rathjen, a representative of the gun control group PolySeSouvient. —with files from Alyshah Hasham, Stephanie Levitz and The Canadian Press However, according to Rod Giltaca, CEO and executive director of the Canadian Coalition for Gun Rights, it`s fairly easy to reverse this change. More importantly, the decision to ban certain models, rather than ban all weapons with similar characteristics and capabilities, means that many weapons will remain on the market as well as those banned. However, the effect is that Canadian duck hunters would still be able to fire three shots without manually reloading between shots, but most caribou and deer hunters could not. Several rifle-fueled semi-automatic shotguns were also included in the 478 pages of additional prohibited firearms appended to the law. Despite this bloody toll, the SKS rifle remains unrestricted. It can be purchased by anyone with a regular firearms licence, sometimes for less than $400. The SKS was born in the 1940s as a Soviet military weapon. Described by the National Rifle Association as “a welcoming, though rugged, rifle,” it was replaced in the 1950s by the more famous AK-47 rifle for Soviet military use. However, the Soviet Union allowed other countries to produce the SKS, so manufacturers in countries such as China and Yugoslavia produced millions of SKS rifles, and dozens of countries used it as a military firearm. Many surplus SKS rifles went to the United States in the 1980s. On May 1, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on many models of semi-automatic weapons.
The Liberals promised this in the 2019 election and decided to use handguns and semi-automatic rifles after the murder of 22 people in Nova Scotia by a gunman. This was not impulsive action, but the result of decades of incidents involving such weapons. But it is a timid measure that bans only a percentage of guns that the Liberals claim are dangerous to the public. OTTAWA – The inquiry into the Liberal government`s decision to invoke the emergency bill in response to weeks of “Freedom Convoy” protests last winter has concluded its public hearings. The exact number of SKS rifles in Canada is not known, but there will likely be at least a million in the country, said Rod Giltaca, executive director of the Canadian Coalition for Gun Rights. But the government may have decided to keep them off its prohibited list because they`re old-fashioned and don`t accept high-capacity magazines, meaning they can`t be reloaded as quickly as other more modern weapons, according to Blake Brown, author of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada. It was in the aftermath of the deadly rampage that two teenagers from Port Alberni in northern British Columbia took place, and at the time I wrote that the Liberals who exploited this tragedy were a bunch of pointless political designed to fool the average Canadian who knows nothing about guns into thinking the government was doing something to make them safer. The Liberals` action, however, is a piecemeal effort. The government is proposing that current owners be able to keep their firearms under a provision that will be included in future legislation. And there will be a two-year amnesty period during which gun owners will be able to keep their guns. “The majority of Canada`s 2.2 million licensed firearms owners will now be criminalized if these changes to the bill become Bill C-21,” Tony Bernardo, executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, said in a statement. Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns are widely used as hunting weapons in Canada, which is why gun advocates say the ban would likely apply to millions of firearms currently actively used by Canadian hunters and sport shooters.
SKS has been involved in shootings in Canada for decades. In the summer of 2019, it was the weapon involved in a week-long manhunt across the country after two teenagers killed three travellers in northern British Columbia. This is meant to make you think you`re safer. But you`re not. However, this would cause them to lose a good number of votes, so don`t expect that to ever happen. However, she hopes that Marco Mendicino, the federal Minister of Public Safety, will eventually introduce a complete ban on all offensive weapons, a promise the minister made when he announced Bill C-21 on May 30. Trudeau chose his words differently in English, saying that “Canadians can rest assured that the integrity of our elections has not been compromised.” In 2020, the federal government announced a ban on approximately 1,500 makes and models of military and “assault” weapons in Canada.