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Though it’s hard to track with certainty, there are some reports that Canadians are buying up ammunition and firearms. This is happening as well in the United States. Those already ill disposed toward civilian firearms ownership in Canada probably feel a bit queasy at the prospect of guns and ammo flying off of shelves, and assume it’s driven by blind panic, fear that the COVID-19 pandemic will result in some societal collapse and we’ll all soon be killing each other for the last roll of toilet paper.

There’s undoubtedly some of that going on. But the real answer is probably a lot more mundane, and less easily slotted into pre-existing opinions regarding civilian firearms ownership in Canada. Sorry, culture warriors.

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We’ve seen this before, actually. A series of articles a few years ago made much of a rise in ownership of firearms in Canada — particularly those firearms classified under the Firearms Act as “restricted” firearms. This mostly means handguns, but does include some rifles as well. The number of such firearms lawfully owned by Canadians climbed steadily from 2012 to 2016, the articles noted, and the rise seemed to begin after the Harper government scrapped the long-gun registry in 2012. There may well have been some psychological effect of the scrapping of the long-gun registry on sales of restricted firearms — but not a direct one. The long-gun registry registered non-restricted firearms. It had nothing to do with registration of restricted guns, which has remained in full force to this day. Other Harper-era changes to our gun control laws similarly would have had minimal impact — zero, in most cases — on the sale of restricted guns, because the purchasing and licensing requirements weren’t changed. A lot of Canadians who don’t understand the complexities of our gun-control system probably assumed that scrapping the long-gun registry somehow made it easier or more convenient to buy a handgun. But it didn’t. At all.