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Canada’s earlier registry for shotguns and commonplace rifles was maintained by the federal authorities somewhat than sellers. That long-gun registry, which was affected by technical points however supported by most police forces, was scrapped in 2012 by Stephen Harper, the prime minister of the Conservative authorities on the time.
“Conservatives very a lot affiliate themselves now with the opposition to gun management, however that wasn’t all the time the case,” Blake Brown, a historical past professor at Saint Mary’s College in Halifax, advised me. He mentioned that Liberals and Conservatives handed firearms management measures within the Fifties and Sixties, and that each events strengthened Canada’s gun legal guidelines within the years following the 1989 Montreal bloodbath.
In his guide “Arming and Disarming: A Historical past of Gun Management in Canada,” Professor Brown wrote that Canada’s cultural attitudes towards firearms diverged from these in america as early because the 1860s.
[Read: Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws.]
“Actually there have been intervals in American historical past the place they’ve been extra aggressive in gun management than in Canada,” he mentioned. “However, total, the development has been that Canada has seen themselves in a different way with regards to firearms.” That has led to stricter gun legal guidelines amid fears of importing American gun violence.
Regardless of these historic distinctions, the gun debate raging south of the border usually reverberates right here. Whereas it was removed from the highlight difficulty in our federal election final September, candidates within the ongoing Conservative Occasion management race have been rehashing it.
[Read: Debate Over Guns Is Muted as Canada’s Election Nears]
Throughout our federal election protection in September, my colleague Ian Austen reported that there have been 12.7 million authorized and unlawful weapons in Canada, or 34.7 civilian firearms per 100 folks in 2017, the newest information. (These figures are from the Small Arms Survey, a nonprofit group based mostly in Switzerland, which estimates that there are greater than 300 million weapons in america and 120.5 firearms per 100 folks.)
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