The bill still needs to be passed by parliament, with the ruling Liberals holding only a minority of seats.
“We are introducing legislation to implement a nationwide freeze on handgun ownership,” Trudeau said at a news conference, joined by dozens of families and friends of gun violence victims.
“This means that it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” he said. “In other words, we are capping the handgun market.”
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With this bill, we are moving forward with a national handgun ownership freeze. In other words, he won’t… t.co/95VSLg1Kls
— ANI (@ANI) May 31, 2022
Days after Canada’s worst mass shooting killed 23 people in rural Nova Scotia in April 2020, the government banned 1,500 types of military-grade or assault firearms.
But Trudeau acknowledged on Monday that gun violence continues to rise.
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The government statistics agency reported last week that gun-related violent crime accounts for less than three percent of all violent crime in Canada.
But since 2009, the per capita rate of guns being pointed at someone has nearly tripled, while the rate at which a gun was fired with the intent to kill or injure has increased fivefold.
Nearly two-thirds of gun crimes in urban areas involved handguns.
Trudeau commented: “People should be free to go to the supermarket, their school or their place of worship without fear. People should be free to go to the park or a birthday party without worrying about what might happen from a stray bullet.
“Gun violence is a complex problem,” he said. “But at the end of the day, the math is really, really simple: the fewer guns there are in our communities, the safer everyone will be.”
One Canadian killed by gun violence is one too many. That’s why we’ve banned 1,500 types of military-style assault… t.co/gLgzI1eHSf
— ANI (@ANI) May 31, 2022
The bill would also strip anyone involved in domestic violence or harassment of their firearms license, and remove guns from those deemed a risk to themselves or others, as well as strengthen the border security and criminal sanctions for arms trafficking.
It would also ban long gun magazines capable of holding more than five bullets.