The B.C. government is putting some muscle into a campaign to keep illegal guns out of the hands of gangsters. The federal government should add its strength to the effort.
While the Lower Mainland is notorious for gang-related shootings, criminal groups operate throughout the province, and choking off their supply of guns would keep British Columbians safer. In 2015, firearms were used in more than 2,000 criminal incidents in B.C., and police seized more than 3,000 illegal guns.
This week, the province’s Illegal Firearms Task Force, headed by retired RCMP assistant commissioner Wayne Rideout, delivered a report with 37 recommendations, and the government says it will act on four of them right away:
• The Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, which goes after gangs in B.C., will set up a team to focus on combating the trafficking of illegal firearms.
• The Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit will create an office that will pull together intelligence on illegal firearms, working with the National Weapons Enforcement Support Team and Canada Border Services Agency.
• Police throughout the province will be encouraged to make illegal guns a higher priority.
• The provincial government will push the federal government for a share of the $326.7 million that Ottawa promised over five years to fight guns and gangs.
One of the major strategies the task force recommends is better tracking of the sale of firearms.
More than 270,000 Possession and Acquisition Licences for firearms had been issued in B.C. as of May 2016. At that time, 173,747 restricted and prohibited firearms were registered in the province; that doesn’t include the thousands of rifles and shotguns that are not restricted or prohibited.
Since the short-lived national firearms registry was scrapped by the former federal Conservative government, sellers of rifles and shotguns are not required to record any information about the buyer. That makes it difficult for police to trace the ownership of a long gun that might pass from hand to hand.
The task force recommends that sellers be required to keep point-of-sale records that would match buyers’ identities with the serial numbers of the guns, so that police could see them with a judge’s authorization. That change should be mandated nationally by changing federal law, but the task force argues that if Ottawa won’t play ball, the province should amend its own Firearm Act to include the requirement.
It’s a simple rule and is the law in many American states, including Washington and Oregon. The American regulations are a big reason that over the past three years, 60 per cent of crime guns in B.C. came from Canada, according to the national weapons enforcement support team.
For a country with Canada’s close control of firearms ownership, it’s astonishing that such a requirement is not already in place.
Cutting off the flow of illegal guns and tracking ownership are part of a larger strategy, but the task force’s recommendations go further.
The gangsters don’t care who else gets hurt when they open fire on their enemies. They often attack in public places, such as restaurants, parking lots and streets.
The number of shootings from cars led the task force to recommend a crackdown that could include seizing cars and driver’s licences where gang members are found with illegal firearms in the vehicle, targeting rental companies that rent cars to gang members and revoking vehicle insurance for anyone involved in organized crime.
These and other solid recommendations from the task force would help reduce gang violence in B.C. The report should be required reading for both the provincial and federal governments.
