While the Liberal government has once again extended its amnesty on the possession of so-called assault weapons, there is another draconian gun law adopted a few years ago that is still actively being enforced: the ban on selling and transferring handguns put in place by then-Prime Minster Justin Trudeau in 2023.
There are limited exceptions to the ban, including for the purchase of pistols used in Olympic-style shooting. But other competitive shooting leagues, including the International Practical Shooting Confederation, that use standard handguns, are doomed to extinction if the ban remains in place.
“The writing does seem to be on the wall. I hate to say if nothing changes, then this sport will absolutely die out,” [ISPC competitor Glen] Miller told CBC News.
“It’s tough to stomach something that I’ve invested many thousands of dollars in and many hundreds of hours in … for that just to go away from the stroke of a pen.”
… “Handgun shooting sports is dead. We are just waiting for the corpse to cool,” said John Evers, a board member with the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, in an interview with CBC News.
“There’s no newcomers coming into the sport so … it’s gonna be atrophy, death over the next 10 years.”
That, of course, is exactly what the anti-gun lobby in Canada wants. And once IPSC and other shooting sports involving now-banned firearms have disappeared, they’ll turn their attention to the Olympic-style pistols that remain available for sale.
There’s already a push to end Olympic shooting events. Centerfire disciplines have already been yanked by the IOC, but even the air gun and .22 caliber disciplines are under threat as well. If the shooting sports are ever stripped from the Olympics, gun control activists in Canada and other restrictive countries will have the excuse they need to go after the few guns that have exemptions for sport shooters.
The confederation’s members unsuccessfully lobbied for the same athletic exemption when they appeared before the Standing Senate Committee on Public Safety and National Security in 2022. A common argument raised by gun control advocates was that someone wanting a handgun could lie about their interest in IPSC.
“There’s no need in Canada for civilians to be involved in such activities, and they are very much at odds with Canadian values and culture,” Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, told the committee at the time.
Canada’s restrictions are even worse than what is found in Australia, which requires sport shooters to join an approved shooting club and compete in a set number of events during a six-month probationary period before they’re issued a handgun license.
IPSC officials in Canada are trying to expand into competitions that don’t involve handguns, but as one competitive shooter explained to the CBC, many folks are understandably “leery about purchasing new firearms,” given that “at a stroke of a pen or an email, they could become banned or prohibited as well.”
Anti-gunners in the U.S. haven’t seen nearly as much success as their international counterparts, but we hear arguments similar to Cukier’s all the time. At the moment those arguments are generally deployed against AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols, but if the gun control lobby is ever successful at enacting a ban on those commonly-owned firearms, we know they won’t stop there. Their goal is the complete destruction of our right to keep and bear arms, and an outright prohibition on gun ownership; for self-defense, for hunting, and even recreational and competitive shooting.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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