An estimated 800 gun owners and firearm rights activists assembled on Parliament Hill on Saturday to express their displeasure with the federal government’s gun policies, especially the ban on assault-style firearms announced after the mass killing in Portapique, N.S., in April.
“They are going to spend billions of dollars confiscating our legally-acquired firearms that are locked safely in our safes, in our homes,” Tracey Wilson, vice-president of public relations with the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, said in an interview before the downtown march.
“At the same time, they’ve failed to accomplish anything as far as combatting the actual violence that we’re seeing in the streets, in cities all across the country, and, to me, that’s a big problem.”
In the past five years comprising the federal Liberals’ tenure in government, Wilson said she had observed a “huge increase in participation by Canadians all across the country in this type of (firearms) activism,” linked in large part to the introduction of gun control Bill C-71 and May’s order-in-council outlawing more than 1,500 types of firearms.................