Canada Aims to Force Owners of ‘Military-Style Assault Weapons’ to Turn Them In

OTTAWA — Most homeowners of what Canada calls “military-style assault weapons” could be required to show over their firearms to a authorities buyback program below laws launched on Monday, which might tighten the nation’s already stringent management of firearms.

The Canadian authorities additionally instantly imposed new rules banning the sale, buy, importation or switch of handguns.

“As a authorities, as a society, we have now a accountability to behave to forestall extra tragedies,” Mr. Trudeau instructed reporters on Monday.

The proposed buyback legislation is the most recent in a collection of steps Mr. Trudeau has taken to limit firearms since 22 folks have been killed in rural Nova Scotia by a gunman in 2020, within the deadliest rampage within the nation’s historical past. The gunman was killed by police.

The Canadian laws comes as one other mass capturing in america has reignited an usually searing debate on gun violence. Final week a gunman used a military-style rifle to kill 19 kids and two academics within the city of Uvalde, Tex. Solely 10 days earlier, a teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology opened fireplace at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., capturing and killing 10 folks and injuring three extra, virtually all of them Black.

After 20 kids and 6 adults have been massacred in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary College in Newtown, Connecticut, there have been widespread calls in america for stronger controls on highly effective firearms. However within the intervening years virtually nothing has occurred, with many Republicans aligned with the gun foyer refusing to even enable a vote on any proposed laws.

Mr. Trudeau’s program echoes a semiautomatic weapons ban and buyback program launched by New Zealand in 2019, after a lone gunman stormed two mosques, killing 51 folks and injuring dozens of others in Christchurch. After a mass capturing in 1996 wherein a gunman killed 35 folks within the city of Port Arthur, Australia, the federal government there collected greater than 650,000 semiautomatic rifles and plenty of shotguns after they have been banned below new laws.

American lawmakers have failed to revive restrictions on military-style semiautomatic weapons that expired in 2004. However Mr. Trudeau’s proposal, which may apply to tens of hundreds of firearms, is anticipated to cross.

Whereas his Liberal Celebration doesn’t maintain a voting majority within the Home of Commons, the left-leaning New Democratic Celebration has lengthy pushed for tighter gun controls and is anticipated to assist the brand new measure permitting it to beat any potential opposition from the Conservatives.

A authorities official stated that buybacks will start by the tip of the 12 months.