Provincial gun regulations that have been nine years in the making will come into effect in British Columbia this fall, shutting down what the province call loopholes in federal laws that have helped allow extortion crimes to proliferate.
The new regulations include a ban on firing from vehicles, which has been a feature of a wave of extortions involving shooters firing from cars at homes and businesses, then posting videos of the attacks online.
Public Safety Minister Nina Krieger says the new regulations resulting from the Firearm Violence Prevention Act will help police crack down on such offences.
The new regulations also make it an offence to operate a vehicle illegally transporting a firearm and requiring that imitation and low-velocity firearms, such as pellet guns, are securely stored when being transported.
While the government drafted the legislation before the recent rise of extortion-related shootings, Krieger says the regulations are all about closing "loopholes that are exploited by organized (criminals) and specifically by extortionists causing harm in our communities."
The act, which was originally passed in 2021 and comes into force on Oct. 1, was developed out of a 2017 task force report into illegal firearms.
Krieger says it "took really extensive consultations" over the past five years to strike the right balance with "uninterrupted, safe access" for law-abiding gun owners and criminals.
Attorney General Niki Sharma says extortionists have been testing the "limits of accountability" in several ways, including using rental cars or cars owned by family and friends to transport firearms.
When police discover firearms, Sharma says, individuals often "claim that they didn't know that they were there, or that the firearms belonged to somebody else."
She says such loopholes create "real challenges for prosecution under existing criminal laws, adding the new regulations will remove common defences used by organized criminals and help disrupt their mobility.
"Police rely primarily on the Criminal Code and the federal Firearms Act," Sharma says. "But they come with high evidentiary thresholds, and do not always allow for swift intervention at the street level."
Sharma says the new rules fill these gaps by creating provincial offences, while the act "provides a clear mechanism for police to confiscate and destroy firearms used to commit an offence."
The regulations also prohibit the sale of low-velocity and imitation firearms to anyone under 18.
Krieger says that list includes BB, pellet and airsoft guns, lighters designed to look like firearms, and other objects that could reasonably be mistaken to be firearms.
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl
