The Canadian government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced legislation on Monday, 30 May, that would put a ban on the import, purchase, and sale of handguns.
"We are capping the number of handguns in this country," the prime minister said.
"It will be illegal to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada," he added.
The decision comes in the backdrop three mass shootings in the US in the past three weeks alone, along with another case of shooting in Oklahoma. Prime Minister Trudeau made clear references to the same while announcing Canada's ban.
"We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter," he said.
In one of the deadliest grade school shootings in a decade, an 18-year-old gunman killed at least 19 students and two adults in an elementary school in Texas on 24 May.
Civilian-Owned Guns – The Numbers in US & Canada
The Small Arms Survey estimated that in 2017, there were 12.7 million legal and illegal civilian-owned guns in Canada. That is 34.7 firearms per 100 people.
Comparatively, in the United States, more than 300 million civilian-owned guns in circulation, or 120.5 firearms per 100 people.
The last mass shooting in Canada was the one in Nova Scotia in April 2020, in which a gunman posed as a police officer went on a killing spree leaving almost two dozen people dead.
The deceased included a pregnant woman, a primary school teacher, a 17-year-old teenager and also a police constable, according to the BBC.
That was Canada's worst mass shooting, after which Prime Minister Trudeau had announced an immediate ban on around 1,500 military-grade and "assault-style" weapons in the country.
(With inputs from Reuters and the New York Times.)
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