I collect, am not eligible for 12.6 status, and have had to have some guns altered to "restricted" barrel lengths, to make them legal for me to own. This destroys the collector value of the gun, but they're ones I want for my collection and so I do it. However, there are far more guns I would like to have for which this simple (but heartbreaking) change just isn't feasible. However, it is very hard for me to understand how this provision protects the public in any way.
Crimes with guns rarely involve small .25 and .32 handguns, but rather are committed with the same kind of guns (or bigger) that police use. It would be nice if some gun-neutral university researchers, perhaps in political science, would do some studies to find out if 12.6 (or any of the other provisions of Canadian gun laws) actually can be shown to have any effect on making the public safer, or it they're just another unwarranted sop to pubic fear. And to pass that information on publicly to public safety officials. Such a study was done years ago by Harvard University in Massachusetts after a state law was passed imposing a mandatory one-year jail term on anyone caught in possession of a gun without a license. It was shown clearly to have had no effect at all on criminal behavior involving guns. The law was not repealed, of course, but the study was widely reported in the news, and the law was even more rarely used after that in charging anyone.
