Canada is going to pass a law that will force most owners of military-style assault weapons, and guns to turn them in and ban handgun sales.
Perhaps, the shootouts witnessed in the USA might have driven Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to hasten to pass a law to ban handgun sales and possession of assault weapons.
Recently, in the USA, a gunman used a military-style rifle to kill 19 children and two teachers in the town of Uvalde, Tex. Only 10 days before this, a teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black.
In Canada, twenty-two people were killed in rural Nova Scotia by a gunman in 2020, in the deadliest rampage in the country’s history. The legislation, which could apply to tens of thousands of firearms, is expected to pass.
“As a government, as a society, we have a responsibility to act to prevent more tragedies,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters on Monday. He also said: “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter,” as he hastened to tighten the country’s already strict control of firearms.
Most owners of what Canada names “military-style assault weapons” would be needed to hand over their firearms to a government buyback program under legislation introduced on Monday, which would tighten the country’s already stringent control of firearms.
The Canadian government also announced new regulations that will ban the sale, purchase, importation, or transfer of handguns. “We are capping the number of handguns in this country,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday.
After 20 children and six adults were massacred in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., there were nationwide pleas across America for stronger controls on powerful firearms, but many Republicans aligned with the gun lobby refused to even allow a vote on any proposed legislation. American lawmakers have failed to restore restrictions on military-style semiautomatic weapons that expired in 2004.
New Zealand Conducted a Weapon Ban Buyback Program: Mr. Trudeau’s program reflects a semiautomatic weapons ban and buyback program launched by New Zealand in 2019, after a lone gunman attacked two mosques, killing 51 people and injuring dozens of others in Christchurch.
Australia Conducted a Weapon Ban Buyback Program: There was a mass shooting in 1996 in which a gunman killed 35 people in the town of Port Arthur, Australia, the government there collected more than 650,000 semiautomatic rifles and many shotguns after they were banned under the new legislation.
Marco Mendicino, Canada’s public safety minister, said the buybacks should begin by the end of the year.
The Small Arms Survey, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland, estimated in 2017 that there were 12.7 million legal and illegal guns in civilian hands in Canada, or 34.7 firearms per 100 people. In the United States, it estimates, that there were more than 300 million guns in circulation, or 120.5 firearms per 100 people.
Possession of guns in the hands of even a few crazy people can wreck up a country. One never knows which day a gunman could walk into a school or marketplace and massacre innocent lives. These laws are right on time, for a stitch in time saves nine.