Study released by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute says Canada’s new firearms regulations are unlikely to reduce criminal violence
Analysis led by Dr. Noah Schwartz, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the Fraser Valley
The federal government’s recent changes to firearms regulation are not supported by evidence and are unlikely to reduce criminal violence, according to a new study led by Dr. Noah Schwartz, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the Fraser Valley.
“This study supports the B.C. Wildlife Federation’s long-held position that further regulating law-abiding licensed firearms owners has no impact on criminals or crime,” said BCWF Executive Director Jesse Zeman.
The researchers did a deep dive into the academic literature on gun control and interviewed law enforcement officers and other stakeholders. They found:
- There is no evidence to support a prohibition or confiscation of assault-style weapons in the Canadian context.
- There is no evidence to support a freeze on the legal sales of handguns to licensed gun owners.
- Police are concerned with smuggled firearms from the United States and privately manufactured firearms, not legal gun owners.
Since 2019, the federal government has enacted bans on more than 2,500 rifle models and implemented a ban on the transfer or sale of handguns by licensed owners. The rifle ban and buyback program is aimed at so-called “assault-style” weapons that physically resemble assault rifles. Real assault rifles have been banned in Canada since 1977.
“The use of the term ‘style’ was, in and of itself, a tacit admission that the ban targeted form rather than function,” the authors note.
Assault-style rifles are seldom used in the commission of crimes because they are large and difficult to conceal. Most gun crime in Canada is committed with firearms smuggled in from the United States.
The literature shows that [assault-style weapons] bans have had no impact on firearms homicides (Gius 2014), urban firearm mortality (Huang et al. 2022), and the number of mass shootings (Lemieux 2014), and did not reduce deaths in mass shootings (Lemieux 2014), the authors say.
The study – Off Target: Evaluating post-2019 changes to Canada’s gun control laws – further notes that the federal government’s recent firearms bans do real damage to hunters, Indigenous peoples, sport shooters, and small businesses while drawing police resources away from the root causes of gun crime, criminal gangs and smugglers.
The authors recommend that the federal government pivot to a strategy more likely to have an impact on criminal violence:
- Invest in intelligence and firearm tracing to make gun smuggling more difficult and costly.
- Depoliticize firearms classification.
- Provide sustainable long-term funding across levels of government for community policing initiatives.
- Reverse the assault-style weapons ban. Semi-automatic firearms with detachable low-capacity magazines in the hands of regulated individuals do not pose a threat to public safety.
- Continue to fight the proliferation of 3D-printed firearms and provide additional resources to the courts and police to combat them.
Read the full study here: Off Target: Evaluating post-2019 changes to Canada’s gun control laws | Macdonald-Laurier Institute