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Details of the amnesty will be made public in the near future, a spokesman for Blaney said. Some gun advocates have been left wondering if owners of the Swiss Arms-brand rifles in question — legal in Canada since 2001 — can take their guns outside of their homes.

Shawn Bevins, a spokesman for the National Firearms Association, said the government still had not addressed the bigger issue of how the RCMP was able to “arbitrarily” make decisions to reclassify firearms.

Opposition to the reclassification of the Swiss rifles has ratcheted up in recent days. Gun owners have even been going after the RCMP commissioner, circulating on social media a clip from a TV interview during which Bob Paulson talked about wearing his holstered weapon in the past in the presence of his eldest daughter’s boyfriends.

“If one of her boyfriends were coming over, I’d put it on,” Paulson said in the interview with CPAC’s Beyond Politics just over a year ago. “You could tell where the eyes would go. They would always be polite. But their eyes would be fixated on the device.… It was a lot of fun.”

During the CPAC interview with Catherine Clark, Paulson, who has two daughters, was asked whether his daughters’ boyfriends were ever “frightened out of their minds.”

“Some of them were,” Paulson said, adding that he’d bring in some of his colleagues — who were like “uncles” to his children — to help size up his eldest daughter’s boyfriends.