Have we ever been told how they converted the original Norc.T97 to FA? If so I missed it and if it took a hundred thousand dollars worth of time and a complete trigger assembly smuggled in from China then that conversion is also BS. Short of having a "friend" in the PRC try get a FA trigger group.
Why would the RCMP not tell owners how they converted it, obviously it must be a scary secret and we aren't allowed to be privileged with the information. Well this is Canada where we apparently have a democracy but only when it suits some people.
No we have not (publicly) been told, and it is for exactly the ridiculous reasons you allude to: public safety. The "secret" of the T97A is very well known to lots of people though, and yes there was a big problem with that firearm which is not shared by any other commecially available semi-auto firearm in Canada that I know of - certainly not the 858 or the SAN, both of which I own.
I was legal counsel on the
Firearms Act reference hearing for the T97A which was done in Vancouver Provincial Court in 2011. Originally the Department of Justice were going to try and hold the hearing without even telling us (the applicant and her legal counsel) exactly how they converted the firearm. I think they were even going to try and do it without telling the judge! They were just going to play the video of Murray Smith turning his back with the rifle for 20 seconds, and then turning back and firing it full auto - and top it off with dire warning about public safety. Typical Fascist behaviour: "We can't possibly trust you with this knowledge. Only
we can be trusted."
So, I told the DOJ that this was ridiculous, because on our side we already have access to the applicant's firearm (plus all the unsold ones at Lever, plus the actual select-fire T97 at one of the movie armourers) - there are no secrets, no secret squirrel knowledge that only they possess, and that our expert witness and the other experts we had on our side know more about automatic firearms and have more experience with them than Murray Smith and William Etter (from the RCMP lab, their experts), and as much knowledge as anyone anywhere about how automatic firearms work.
Ultimately they relented and we were disclosed the "modes of conversion" they used (which were all just variations on one basic theme), and we had a full discourse about the "modes of coversion" in court - the catch being that there is a publication ban on the public dissemination of the "modes of conversion", which specifically mentions that they are not to be disseminated via the Internet. The reason is... the RCMP and the Department of Justice are living 120 years in the past, believing that the knowledge of how automatic firearms work is complicated, secret or new... and they want to try and maintain their fantasy.
You can take it from me, as someone who is 100% on the side of Canadian gun owners, that there
was a big problem with the T97A. If you really want to know more about this, get my phone number and call me up some time, or call Blair Hagan (NFA), Chris Youngson (CanadaAMMO), Travis Bader (Silvercore) or one of the other people who was there in the courtroom. We knew about the problem well in advance. Right from the first time our expert witness examined the firearm he told me... "we've got a problem here". It's actually a couple of problems that compound each other to make it incredibly easy to essentially "disable" the semi-auto function of the firearm.
Although there never was a firearms reference hearing for the BD38 or BD3008 (I tried to find someone who wanted to try, but every single person felt it was a lost cause on
Hasselwander) there was a problem with those firearms as well... that they fired from the open bolt with just a simple Sten-type sear, which - on the BD3008 anyway - could apparantly be manipulated by hand to achieve full-auto fire.
Suffice it to say, where there is a problem of the
Hasselwander-type, it related to the sear somehow. I do not for a second believe that the 858 and the SAN have these problems, certainly nothing even remotely close to the T97A or the BD38 or BD3008. The problem is, once the ball gets rolling and the RCMP are able to prohib some firearms on their own initiative - are they going to stop? Hell no. They will keep going until they are forced to stop. That is what we have to do now. Murray Smith and William Etter must be forcibly retired, the firearms lab shut down and moved to another agency, and it made absolutely clear - in no uncertain terms - to everyone in the employ of the federal government that they are not entitled to pursue policy objectives - and if they do, they'll be cleaning out their desk by the end of the day. Enough of this B.S. This is
our government.