Editor:
This letter was sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
With my local newspaper, the Coast Reporter, I received today a sale flyer from www.proutdoors.com based in Powell River. In this flyer I was surprised and disturbed to discover advertising for the following:
1. Several repeating shotguns with 5-6 cartridge capacity.
2. Two short barrel (14 inch), pistol grip shotguns, favoured by bank robbers and other gangsters in earlier years, called “sawed-off shotguns” in those times because they were easy to conceal under a coat. As an aside, the short barrels impair the accuracy of them, therefore they are totally unsuitable for hunting.
As I recall from being a teenaged hunter about 70 years ago, both of these guns then were illegal. Repeating shotguns were limited to a three-cartridge capacity and shotguns were limited to a minimum barrel length of 20 inches.
In this day and age, when there are fewer hunters based upon population size than there were 70 years ago (since I could not find any hunter numbers for 1950, I can only extrapolate from 1991 to 2020 which indicated a decline of 54 hunters/1000 pop. to 35/1000 respectively), so I don’t understand why it was deemed necessary to expand the publicly available firepower thus. Therefore, I am worried about where we are going with gun control in the future?
Gordon Catherwood, Gibsons
