Legislation would facilitates forcing people to give up firearms if there’s history of domestic violence. But legal experts have some doubts.
HALIFAX—The gunman in Canada’s worst mass shooting was known by both neighbours and by police to have physically abused his common-law wife repeatedly, dating back as far as 2013.
Those provisions in the proposed bill are designed, in government words, to address “intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and self-harm involving firearms.” “The purpose of introducing the red-flag laws, along with some other tools, is to address the alarming rise in domestic abuse in connection with gun violence,” Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino told the Star.
And victims of intimate partner violence are about five times more likely to be killed when a firearm is present in the home. Other studies show that access to a firearm in the home closely correlates with risk of completed suicide and homicide. “The evidence shows that people who are abusive in private spaces can be very abusive and violent in public,” she said. “It’s another of those things that we see that people have private domestic violence and they would go on to do mass shootings and hate-crime situations.”What is reported in terms of domestic violence is merely the tip of a giant iceberg, said Gunraj.
But while the intent is pretty clear, the details on how the court might actually proceed are a bit fuzzy. While Bill C-21 may be ready for Parliament, it’s not clear that it is ready for the courts.At the least, there’s little clarity so far on how the accommodations for protecting applicants’ identities might clash with Charter-enshrined open court principles, said Errol Mendes, professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.
Existing legislation already provides a mechanism for the firearm owners to have their licences reviewed, said Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control. But over the years, she said, that mechanism has been diluted — she has seen the bar for incidents that would flag dangerous gun owners raised and has seen disconnects between concerns being raised and police action being taken — the Nova Scotia killings being a prime example.
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