IF HANDGUNS WERE BANNED
What it would look like in Canada
Bill Blair, the new federal minister of organized crime reduction, is studying a “full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada.” The assignment follows weeks of calls from Toronto and Montreal for a total handgun ban.
More than one million Canadian handguns are legally held in private hands, the vast majority of which will spend their entire lives cutting tiny holes in paper targets.
Canadian handgun bans have been proposed before, most notably by then prime minister Paul Martin in 2005. But what would it look like if the government ever did it for real?
EXISTING HANDGUNS WOULD PROBABLY BE GRANDFATHERED IN
Canada bans guns relatively frequently. In 1998, the same federal law that introduced the gun registry also banned pistols with a muzzle length of less than 4.1 inches (105 mm). The RCMP also has unilateral power to ban the sale of any firearm for any reason, such as in 2014 when it did so with a semiautomatic rifle called the Swiss Arms Classic Green, or in February when it did so with the CZ Bren. In both those cases, guns are simply reclassified as being “prohibited,” which means that they were banned for sale or import, but could still be possessed by people who already owned them.
A BAN WOULDN’T MAKE IT ANY MORE OR LESS ILLEGAL TO CARRY A GUN
In the United States, municipal handgun bans have occasionally been proposed as an easy way to spot and bust armed criminals. With open or concealed carry legal across much of the United States, it’s difficult for U.S. police to immediately determine if a man with a gun is simply an armed citizen or a criminal. But Canadian police don’t have that problem: Any handgun is a “restricted” firearm, which subjects it to way tougher rules than for a standard hunting rifle. The only legal place to fire a handgun in Canada is on a registered range — and the gun can’t be transported to the range unless it’s unloaded, fitted with a trigger lock and the owner has been granted an “Authorization to Transport” by the RCMP. Thus, ban or no ban, anybody walking around a Canadian city with a handgun is almost always a criminal. And if a gun owner so much as brings a pistol along on a hunting trip, they could be risking the seizure of their entire gun collection.
IT WOULD LIKELY STOP CANADIAN HANDGUNS BEING USED IN CRIMES
Right now, a criminal somewhere is carrying a firearm that began life in a Canadian gun shop. In 2017, Toronto police numbers show that of 726 crime guns seized, 148 were domestically sourced. One method is a criminal gang finds someone with a clean record to take a firearms safety course and acquire a gun possession licence. That person then buys up a small arsenal and has it “accidentally” cleaned out in a break-in. This particular loophole would obviously disappear in a Canada without retail sales of pistols. However, it’s reasonable to assume that smuggled U.S. guns could quickly flood any gap in the black market. A 2008 study commissioned by the Government of British Columbia found that the “vast majority” of the province’s guns were coming from just across the border in Washington State. And it was only six years ago that up to 75 per cent of Toronto’s guns were coming from the U.S.
CRIME COULD WELL BE UNAFFECTED
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, is a vocal opponent of the recent push for a handgun ban, saying last week that it would have “no impact.” McCormack isn’t a gun nut by any means; he told the National Post he’s “not against banning or prohibiting firearms in a way that’s going to impact public safety.” But when most of Toronto’s shootings are obviously gang-related, McCormack said the more immediate and effective strategy is more preventive police paired with programs to steer youth out of gangs.
“We can ban handguns for any number of reasons,” added Christian Leuprecht, a crime policy researcher at both Queen’s University and Royal Military College, “but if we think it’s going to do anything about the violence then it’s not the policy measure to implement.”
IT COULD TAKE A WHILE TO DRIVE DOWN CRIME
In 1997, in response to the massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school, the U.K. effectively banned private ownership of firearms. The next year, crimes involving guns went up — and continued going up for the rest of the decade. In 1997-98, there were 12,805 offences in England and Wales involving a firearm. By 2001-02, it was up to 22,401. “The short-term impact strongly suggests that there is no direct link between the unlawful use of handguns and their lawful ownership,” read a 2001 report from the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College, London.
Fortunately, the long-term rate of British gun crime did eventually go down, with handgun crime now sitting at roughly half what it once was.
Meanwhile, the textbook example of a gun ban gone wrong is in Venezuela. The country banned all private ownership of guns in 2012, only to see homicides continue to climb — particularly after the country’s economy began to unravel in 2015.
HISTORY’S LARGEST WEAPONS MARKET IS NEXT DOOR
The U.K. and Australia are often cited as success stories in gun control. Both countries are also islands with famously strict border controls. Canada, by contrast, shares a long and porous border with the most gun-saturated country in the history of human civilization. “All that’s going to happen is a displacement effect where we’re going to see more guns coming across the border,” said Leuprecht, who has studied U.S.-Canadian gun smuggling pipelines.
He said a standard method of cross-border smuggling is to fill a box with guns, equip it with a GPS tracker and strap it to the bottom of a car with a Canadian licence plate parked near the U.S. border. Then, once the unwitting Canadian drives home, criminals follow the GPS and snatch the box from their driveway. “It is so easy to bring guns into this country,” Leuprecht said.