Battle over Chinese-made rifle pits gun enthusiasts against RCMP
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GLORIA GALLOWAY
OTTAWA—
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Dec. 20, 2010 7:07PM EST
<h5 class="articledateline sans sm">Last updated Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010 4:56AM EST</h5>Several gun owners are refusing to surrender a semi-automatic rifle that
was imported from China and bought legally before the RCMP
retroactively declared it a prohibited weapon.
The police force says that the imposing-looking Norinco Type 97A can
easily be converted to a fully automatic weapon and must be prohibited
on that basis.
But 15 gun owners have refused to accept the $1,400 per firearm that
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has offered to anyone who voluntary
relinquishes one of the rifles. The gun owners have gone to court in an
effort to prevent their weapons from being confiscated.
“These 15 individuals will retain possession of their firearms until the
disposition of their hearings,” the RCMP said in a briefing note
earlier this year to Mr. Toews. “Potentially, it could take years before
the matter is finally resolved and the firearms are surrendered or
seized.”
Firearms retailers say the rifle has been prohibited largely because of its appearance.
Canada’s National Firearms Association says the RCMP is exceeding its
mandate by reclassifying the Norinco Type 97A and the issue “threatens
to seriously erode confidence in the Conservative government” on the
part of firearms owners.
Firearms that have been allowed into the country are usually
reclassified only by order of the federal cabinet, said Blair Hagen, a
spokesman for the firearms association.
“It’s very unusual what the RCMP has done here,” Mr. Hagen said in a
telephone interview. “As it appears, the reclassification was
arbitrary.”
The RCMP, which is responsible for classifying firearms before they come
into the country, suggests in the briefing note that outdated
regulations are the reason that the Norinco Type 97A was incorrectly
classified.
The outdated regulations “have created delays in service delivery to law
enforcement potentially compromising public safety because additional
time is required to research, document, and justify information being
added” to the Firearms Reference Table, the electronic library of all
known firearms, the briefing note said.
The note, which was obtained under Access to Information legislation by
Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin, said that between 2006 and 2007,
Vancouver-based Lever Arms Service Ltd. imported 60 of the rifles for
sale to licensed businesses and gun owners.
“The RCMP subsequently determined 55 of these firearms were fully
automatic and thus prohibited,” said the note. But the gun sellers and
the firearms association say the guns are semi-automatic weapons and
were sold on that basis.
When Lever and another company tried to import more of the guns, agents
from the Canada Border Services Agency opened the crate and were alarmed
by their appearance. They sent a sample of the shipment to the RCMP’s
forensics laboratory, which was able to convert the rifle to an
automatic weapon.
That doesn’t surprise the gun owners, who say any rifle can be made to
fire automatically with the right tools and a little know-how. “The
Simonov SKS, which is an incredibly common semi-automatic rifle in
Canada, can be converted to fully automatic with as little as a popsicle
stick,” one of them said on Monday.
Despite the intimidating appearance of Norinco Type 97A, which looks
very much like the military weapon it was originally designed to be, gun
enthusiasts in this country use it for “target shooting, hunting
coyotes, gophers and things like that,” the gun owner said.
The second shipment of the rifles, worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars, is still sitting in limbo a Vancouver warehouse. The weapons
can’t be sold in Canada and they can’t be shipped back to China because
it is illegal to export automatic weapons to that country.