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At the end of last month it emerged that Bill Blair, the new minister of organized crime reduction, had been tasked by the Liberal government with examining a “full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada.” This follows weeks of calls from both Toronto and Montreal for a total handgun ban.

Handguns are indeed the primary weapon behind a well-publicized surge in Toronto gun violence. There are also more than one million Canadian handguns legally held in private hands, the vast majority of which will spend their entire lives cutting tiny holes in paper targets.

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Canadian handgun bans have been proposed before, most notably by then prime minister Paul Martin in 2005. But what would it look like if a Canadian government ever did it for real?

Existing handguns would probably be grandfathered in

Canada bans guns relatively frequently. In 1998, the same federal law that introduced the gun registry also banned pistols with a muzzle length of less than 4.1 inches (105 mm). The RCMP also has unilateral power to immediately ban the sale of any firearm for any reason, such as in 2014 when it did so with a semi-automatic rifle called the Swiss Arms Classic Green, or in February when it did so with the CZ Bren. In all those cases, guns are simply reclassified as being “prohibited,” which means that they were banned for sale or import, but could still be possessed by people who already owned them. There are countries, most notably Australia, that have accompanied gun bans with massive government buyback schemes to immediately clear a class of firearms from the private market. But Canada almost always takes the less-controversial “grandfathering” route. Thus, if the federal government ever engineered a total handgun ban, the likely result is that handguns would disappear from store shelves while existing handgun owners would be able to hold on to their collections. As an example take the Walther PPK, the pistol famous as James Bond’s preferred sidearm. It was reclassified as prohibited by the 1998 ban on short-muzzled pistols, but any Canadian who was already registered to own a PPK was permitted to keep it. Now, when a Canadian PPK owner dies, the pistol must either be sold to someone else with a pre-1998 licence — or be surrendered to law enforcement for destruction.