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Canada’s earlier registry for shotguns and normal rifles was maintained by the federal authorities reasonably than sellers. That long-gun registry, which was stricken 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, informed me. He mentioned that Liberals and Conservatives handed firearms management measures within the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, and that each events strengthened Canada’s gun legal guidelines within the years following the 1989 Montreal bloodbath.
In his e-book “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 the USA as early because the 1860s.
[Read: Other Countries Had Mass Shootings. Then They Changed Their Gun Laws.]
“Definitely there have been intervals in American historical past the place they’ve been extra aggressive in gun management than in Canada,” he mentioned. “However, general, the pattern has been that Canada has seen themselves otherwise in relation 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 situation in our federal election final September, candidates within the ongoing Conservative Social gathering 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 latest 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 the USA and 120.5 firearms per 100 folks.)
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