ASSAULT WEAPONS
Liberals drafting tough laws
• The drafting of tougher gun laws has begun, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said Tuesday on the day marking the 10th anniversary of the rampage at Montreal’s Dawson College by a man firing a semi-automatic assault carbine still sold legally today.
Pressed by reporters as he headed into a cabinet meeting, Goodale deflected questions about the continued sale in Canada of the Beretta Cx4 Storm semi-automatic carbine, the restricted weapon used by Kimveer Gill to slay Dawson student Anastasia De Sousa, 18, and wound 16 others at the junior college’s downtown campus. Gill, 25, then killed himself with a handgun.
Similar restricted firearms have nearly doubled in number in Canada since 2006.
The Storm can be purchased by anyone with a licence to possess a restricted firearm and must be registered with the RCMP’s Canadian Firearms Program. But Beretta has since introduced a similar gun in Canada — the Cx4 carbine rifle — with an extended 19-inch barrel. The design change moves the gun into a non-restricted classification, making it available to anyone with a basic gun licence and does not have to be registered with authorities.
Goodale declined to comment on that, too.
“I think it’s better to do it that way in a coherent way to be the most effective,” he said, referring to the Liberal’s election campaign commitment to repeal elements of Bill C-42, the former Conservative’s government’s 2015 gun law.
“That process is underway in developing the specific legislative proposals,” Goodale said.
“I want to produce during the weeks ahead the full, specific package that we’re talking about. We treat this subject very seriously and this is a sad anniversary, and we express to all of those, the victims and the families and the friends of the people who suffered this tragedy our very heartfelt condolences and messages of support.”
Goodale’s reluctance to address the availability of the Cx4 triggered an angry response from prominent gun-control advocate Heidi Rathjen, a survivor of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal and spokeswoman for gun control group Poly se souvient.
“It is outrageous that a weapon that the coroner said should have been banned in the first place, not only is it still legal, but it’s more readily available for ordinary Canadians to own,” Rathjen said following a Tuesday memorial ceremony at Dawson. “As a non-restricted weapon, police don’t know how many there are, who has them, how many they have and who they’re selling them to.
“This has been an issue for 26 years now, that we need to get certain weapons off the market,” she said. “The solution is: you do not allow weapons that are designed for military purposes into the hands of civilians.”
In the decade since the Dawson horror, the number of registered firearms owned by Canadians has soared 87 per cent, to 795,845, according to the federal commissioner of firearms. That includes a 9.5 per cent increase last year over 2014.
“The politicians who know what the solution is, who made the promise to address this, we still see no commitment to ban these weapons,” Rathjen said. “It’s unfortunate that the debate about gun control is still left up to the victims.”
In a statement commemorating the tragedy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “The government of Canada’s top priority is to protect Canadians. We condemn all forms of violence and consider all attacks designed to spread fear and kill innocent people to be unacceptable.”
Trudeau made no mention of the Liberal’s promised gun-control reforms. They include restoring the requirement for a specific permit to transport restricted and prohibited weapons to and from such locations as a shooting range or gunsmith. Under C-42, authorization to transport the weapon is automatic with the granting of a licence.
The Liberals have vowed also to repeal a section of C-42 giving cabinet, not police, final say over which firearms are restricted. The Conservatives used the new power just before the start of last year’s election campaign to reverse an RCMP ban on certain Czech- and Swissmade rifles that closely resemble prohibited automatic firearms, the most restricted class of guns.