Misfire: Firearm Registration in Canada

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Notes

¹ Canadians have long decided to ignore the 1934 law requiring them to register their handguns. The RCMP unofficially estimates that there are at least as many unregistered handguns in the hands of “ordinary” Canadians as there are registered handguns. A former BC Provincial Firearm Officer told me that he estimates there are 2 or 3 times as many unregistered handguns in Canadian households as registered handguns (Newson, 1992).

² Firearm owners may be charged for “unsafe storage” if unauthorized persons have access to their firearms. Charges are still possible even if the firearms have trigger locks and have been locked in a safe.

³ Alberta challenged the legislation on the basis that the federal scheme violated the constitutional distribution of powers. According to the Canadian constitution, the provinces are responsible for regulating normal usage of private property. Three other provinces joined Alberta: Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia joined the challenge later after provincial elections changed their government. In addition, all three territories joined the challenge.

⁴ Up until the law was changed in 1950, Canadian law defined an alien as any person who was not a British subject. Early in the twentieth century, few Asians or Blacks qualified as British subjects, nor, of course, did many of the Americans then living in Canada.

⁵ For Canada, World War II started on September 10, 1939, when Canada declared war against Germany. Canada didn’t declare war on Japan until after Pearl Harbour.

⁶ An automatic—or fully automatic—firearm continues to shoot as long as the trigger is held down—or until the magazine is empty. The RCMP were concerned about their potential for misuse, even though automatic firearms are rarely involved in criminal activity.

⁷ Orders-in-Council are decisions made at the Cabinet level and therefore undergo no parliamentary review and are secret. Neither the public nor the Parliament (outside of the members of Cabinet) are aware of them until they are issued in the name of the Canadian government.

⁸ The certificate cost $10.

⁹ Accidental firearm deaths are rare, and in any case, firearm storage is already covered under provincial hunting regulations. Firearms accidents declined dramatically in the 1960s with the introduction of mandatory hunter safety courses (Mauser, 1995a).

¹⁰ Semi-automatic firearms are self-loading. A separate trigger squeeze is required for each shot. Many common sporting firearms are semi-automatic.

¹¹ No empirical studies had been conducted to determine which, if any, types of firearms pose a threat to public security.

¹² Similar penalties have been included in each of the firearm amendments since the 1960s, but they have rarely been enforced (Meredith et al., 1994).

¹³ These are only a few of the onerous provisions in the Firearms Act. Edward Burlew, a lawyer, provides a more thorough treatment of the implications of this legislation in his book (Burlew, 2000).

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