Gun Control

Alberta won’t sign on to any handgun ban options Ottawa may offer, and says it’s willing to take the fight to court if provincial firearms jurisdiction is disregarded.

The federal Liberal government planned to give municipalities the ability to implement a ban but has adjusted since the last election to focus on working with provinces.

Alberta’s United Conservative government has long opposed many of the firearm measures proposed by the federal government, saying banning handguns would disproportionately punish law abiding gun owners and fail to adequately tackle the illegal use of firearms.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal cabinet outlawed “assault-style” weapons with the wave of a pen on May 1, 2020 – no House of Commons debate, no Parliamentary committee review – the RCMP estimated there were between 90,000 and 105,000 such firearms in the country.

A Trafalgar Group poll of likely general election voters from the Democrat Party shows a majority of respondents believe “the strict gun laws in most major cities” do not in any way curb the “current retail crime surge.”

Gun purchases accelerated in the US during 2020-2021 compared to 2019, with more than 5 million adults becoming first-time gun owners between January 2020 and April 2021 compared to 2.4 million adults in 2019, a study on new gun ownership reveals.

The survey, conducted by Professor Matt Miller at Northeastern University and published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows that between January 2019 and April this year, around 7.5m people, or 2.9% of all US adults who had not previously owned guns, purchased them.

“I’ve always been anti-gun,” said Debbie Mizrahie of Beverly Hills. “But I am right now in the process of getting myself shooting lessons because I now understand that there may be a need for me to know how to defend myself and my family. We’re living in fear.”

During Black Lives Matter protests last year, Mizrahie told The Post, her neighbor’s home was firebombed with Molotov cocktails.

“My kids were outside and they saw a huge explosion,” she said. “[The neighbor’s] backyard went up in smoke. Trees burned down … But it’s only gotten worse. Beverly Hills has been targeted.”

The Nevada supreme court has said gun manufacturers cannot be held liable for deaths in the 2017 mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip which killed 60, because a state law shields them from liability unless the weapon malfunctions.

The parents of a woman among those killed at a packed music festival filed a wrongful death suit against Colt Manufacturing and several other gun manufacturers in July 2019.

The suit said the gun companies “knowingly manufactured and sold weapons designed to shoot automatically because they were aware their AR-15s could be easily modified with bump stocks to do so, thereby violating federal and state machine gun prohibitions”.

The Toronto police officer who shot gunsmith Rodger Kotanko nearly a month ago won’t talk to Ontario’s police watchdog.

Special Investigations Unit (SIU) spokesperson Kristy Denette told CBC Hamilton on Tuesday morning, the subject officer also “declined to release his notes, as is his legal right.”

Kotanko’s family and their lawyer say they’re not surprised but are disappointed.

Liberty needs defending from the threat of tyranny

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was out hunting for supplies, running through scenarios and planning for contingencies. I found myself at a local gun shop, where a line of edgy patrons stretched out the door and down the block. It’s not the kind of place my high school self would have imagined my middle-aged self would frequent. I am, after all, an American liberal, and American liberals, as a rule, believe that our founders (fresh from a war they won with muzzle-loaded weapons) left us in a terrible mess with respect to modern guns.

Nov 25 (Reuters) – The murder rate in Canada last year rose to its highest level since 2005, pushed up in part by the country’s worst-ever mass shooting, in which 22 people died, Statistics Canada said on Thursday.

Statscan also noted societal stresses it said had been caused by lockdowns linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Canadian police reported 743 murders in 2020, up from 687 in 2019. The murder rate increased to 1.95 per 100,000 people, the highest in 15 years.