It’s hard to believe the former Conservative government could have watered down gun control legislation more than it did when it closed the long gun registry in 2012.

But it did. In the dying days of its government in 2015 it managed to pass Bill C-42, a law that made it tougher for police to keep a watchful eye over who buys guns by limiting the power of chief firearms officers. It also relaxed transport rules for guns and introduced a six-month amnesty for licence renewals, among other measures.

At the time, the Trudeau Liberals were campaigning on a platform that included promises to repeal some of the changes Bill C-42 ushered in and to introduce further efforts aimed at reducing gun crime in Canada.

It’s time the government acted on those promises to counter a worrisome increase in the number of firearms and a spike in gun crime.

As noted by Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, the number of restricted firearms, mostly handguns, has increased by 50 per cent over the last five years to about 795,000. And as she argues, it’s only logical that the more guns there are out there, the more chance some will end up in the wrong hands.

In fact, Toronto is seeing a significant increase in the use of guns in violent crime. Consider that as of Monday the city had already seen 35 gun homicides in 2016, up from a total of 21 in 2015. Though it’s not quite “the year of the gun,” when Toronto saw 52 gun deaths in 2005, the trend is frightening enough.

Also troubling is the fact that the majority of illegal firearms in the city now originate in Canada, not the United States.

No wonder. It’s disturbingly easy for licensed gun owners to buy multiple guns with a single permit, and then sell them on the black market. As Betsy Powell reported in Saturday’s Star, security guard Andrew Winchester, for example, purchased an astonishing 47 handguns in a six-month buying binge.

Though all of those handguns would have been added to the Canadian Firearms Registry at the time of purchase, no red flags were raised or followed up on by the chief firearms officers.

It’s not clear why this is happening. It could be because of the watering down of the chief firearms officers’ powers by Bill C-42, or the fact police don’t have the resources to interview gun purchasers. Or, as one Toronto cop complained in a memo obtained by Powell, it could be because an internal conflict within the RCMP’s Canadian Firearms Program has created obstacles to police obtaining information from its registry.

But whatever the reasons, the Trudeau government needs to solve them quickly. Among the government’s most important promises:

Require enhanced background checks to purchase a handgun or other restricted firearm.

Require purchasers to actually show their licence when they buy a gun and for retailers to confirm it is valid.

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Repeal measures in Bill C-42 that allowed restricted and prohibited weapons to be transported without a permit.

The Liberals recognized all those issues in last year’s election campaign. Now they are in power, they should act on them.

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