OTTAWA: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday a freezing of proposed for pistol ownership in Canada which will effectively prohibit their imports and sales, after the new mass shooting in the United States.The bill must still be ratified by parliament, with liberals in power only holding a small part of the chair.
“We introduce the law to implement national freezing on pistol ownership,” Trudeau told a press conference, joining dozens of families and friends of victims of weapons.
What does it mean that this will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer, or import a gun anywhere in Canada,” he said. “In other words, we limit the market for a gun.”A few days after the worst mass shooting of Canada killed 23 people in Rural Nova Scotia in April 2020, the government banned 1,500 types of military class firearms or attack styles.
But Trudeau admitted Monday that weapons violence continued to increase.The Government Statistics Agency reported last week that violent crimes related to firearms contributed less than three percent of all crimes of violence in Canada.But since 2009 the per capita weapon level directed at someone has been almost tripled, while the level at which weapons are fired with the intention to kill or injured five times.
Nearly two thirds of arms crimes in urban areas involved pistols.Police often appoint smuggling from the United States – who staggered from the new shooting at a school in Texas and in a supermarket in the state of New York – as the main source of pistols.
The Minister of Public Safety Marco Denicino estimates that there are around one million pistols in this country – rising significantly from a decade ago.Trudeau commented, “People must be free to go to the supermarket, their school or their place of worship without fear. People must be free to go to the park or to a birthday party without worrying about what might happen from stray bullets.
“Weapons violence is a complex problem,” he said. “But in the end, the mathematics is really very simple: the less weapons in our community, the safer everyone.”The proposed law will also remove anyone involved in domestic violence or stalking their firearms licenses, and take weapons from those who are considered as risks for themselves or others, and strengthen border security and criminal penalties for trade weapon.
It will also forbid a long pistol magazine that is able to hold more than five bullets.
