canvas, there's something I never have understood - in a country with as much wilderness as Canada and relatively small (in terms of relative area) urban concentrations, why the gun antagonism? Same thing in Australia - it doesn't make sense.
I hadn't realized that you don't have a significant religious right (I suppose I never really thought about it) - it has indeed gotten weird in the US.
I'll try to answer your question briefly, but "briefly" isn't my strong suit. Lol
Much like Australia, the gun control lobby used a particular mass murder that happened in a college in Montreal I think in 1992 as the raison d'tre for their cause. Some crazy guy went into the college and singled out women to shoot and kill. He killed 14 of them. Many were shot while police stood outside "securing" the building.
The anti gun crowd were able to leverage both the mass murder aspect of this with the gender specific targeting, to whip up the anti gun sentiment with the political class at the time. And the politicians felt compelled to be seen as "doing something". Didn't seem to matter that their choice of action would not have prevented the actions of the gunman in the case described. If one objected at the time, the memory of the dead women was evoked to shame the opposition into silence.
At the same time there was a notorious shooting in Toronto, where a late night dessert only restaurant was held up by armed gunmen who killed a couple of people. The shocker there was that traditionally Toronto was viewed as a very safe city and the location was a very safe part of town. I frequented the restaurant regularly with my wife and friends.
Illegal handgun violence was on the rise in the three large centres and both the public and the politicians were casting about wondering what was happening to nice, safe Canada.
In my earlier post I forgot to mention that the urban areas of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa comprise over 40% of the population of Canada. So the influence politically in terms of sheer numbers of elected officials coming from those locations is very significant.
The result was the passage of bill C68, which ramped up significantly gun control in many different ways, the long gun registry just being a small part of it. They prohibited many kinds of guns, including all hand guns of .25 and .32 calibers, created the licensing program for all gun owners, the long gun registry to go along with the hand gun registry which had been in place since the 1930s and onerous safe storage laws which to this date are so vague, and therefore very flexible from an enforcement standpoint, that even the courts today ave difficulty figuring them out. All non compliance with the new laws became criminal charges, rather than regulatory offenses.
In the last 20 years Canada has seen tremendous growth in most urban centres, big and smaller, of gang activity and violence. It is a new thing up here and law enforcement has been unable to stem the tide in the slightest. Hold ups, drive by shootings, intergang warfare....it's all over the place now. And that stuff gets headlines. The fact that the real rate of violent crime is dropping gets missed.
The fact that most guns used to commit these crimes are unknown to the authorities i.e. not registered and that the people who commit these crimes are unlikely to follow government rules about safe storage, firearms safety training and not shooting people is lost on the antis and the politicians who support the regulations.
