  |
|||
|
|
|
||
|
Posted by Daniel Workman Jun 13, 2008 |
According to Jim Bronskill of the Canadian Press, a British Columbian firm licensed to import guns for use on movie sets was charged for illegally distributing submachine guns to local criminals.
A year later in 2007, police traced two assault rifles used in a January 2007 shootout in British Columbia. A west-coast company with a movie import licence was responsible for bringing those weapons into Canada.
Movie production companies can legally buy guns in bulk internationally. They then import those weapons into Canada for use on their movie sets. The loophole in the law is the loosely defined deadline for registering imported guns, vaguely worded as "as soon as practical".
The result is that imported guns are never registered. Instead, gun dealers ignore the registration process and keep the weapons. The movie company simply says that they no longer have the guns.
Meanwhile, gun dealers sell the firearms to criminals on the black market.
How do you catch these international trade criminals when they never have to register the imports that they are accused of selling? Absent proof that they ever handled the products after delivery to the movie producer, the gun dealers simply point the finger at the movie production company or disappear after making their tidy profits.
The next time you're staring down the barrel of a legally imported but illegally distributed gun, ask yourself how effective Canada's "as soon as practical" gun registration legal wording is. And I'm not talking about watching an action movie on the big screen.