It's probably still a net positive to make it harder to purchase guns because that reduces the number of overall guns in circulation that can be stolen and sold illegally or used in suicide or accidental death.

It depends a lot on what, exactly, they're banning. But "assault-style" weapons are, if the stats up there are anything like what they are in the U.S., used in a vanishingly small percentage of crimes or suicides. This seems more like a bromide in response to the recent mass shooting up there.

You’re correct, most illegal firearms come from the states and these changes don’t address that in any way so imo it’s just lip service.

Gun control in Canada and probably most countries isn’t cohesive, it’s a bunch of half-assed policies piled on top of each other that leave a ton of gaps to exploit while simply creating a headache because nobody has the guts to actually just say the whole thing is getting ridiculous. Everybody ends up coming across as stupid because you can’t just fix it by making changes here and there. When your main point is that hunters don’t need these guns maybe don’t make a concession for indigenous hunters to keep using them. This applies to some non-restricted firearms that have become prohibited. So up until now once they left the store with the original owner there was 0 tracking of who had that firearm. This didn’t make it harder to purchase a firearm, non restricted firearms still exist. It’s actually pretty easy in Canada.

You get your PAL which takes time and goes through all the checks that people like. You get a number and if you want to buy a non restricted firearm from another private citizen you tell them your number, they should call to make sure it’s good and matches what you’re saying ( it is illegal to sell to anybody who doesn’t have a PAL, but there’s no check here to make sure people aren’t getting to relaxed on this ) then you proceed like any sale. If you’re buying from somebody online they wrap it up nicely and ship it Canada Post like anything else. A while back I mentioned that on here and it surprised some American gun owners. Restricted firearms are similar except you have to change the registration to the new owner ( you can call to do this ) before you mail it.

We still have guns we don’t track the ownership of, and we didn’t do anything about the American border. The only thing that really happened was a headache was created for a bunch of gun owners who become one issue voters in the next election, because as easily as this was done it can be undone by the next government.

This Liberal government was the one who said gun classification shouldn’t be politicized when they introduced Bill C-71

"After the definitions have been set in law by Parliament, it should be firearms experts who make the technical determination as to which firearm fits into which category. That is a factual, technical function, and it should not be politicized. Bill C-71 makes that point very clear," Goodale said.

The Liberals say that, under Harper, cabinet was able to "contradict the experts" and assign a lower category to a particular firearm. Those opposed to C-71 say the government is abdicating its legislative responsibilities by allowing police to make these choices without political approval.

Seems pretty politicized to me.