Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday announced the introduction of a bill that would place a national freeze on handgun ownership across Canada.
"What this means is that it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada," Trudeau said in a news conference.
"In other words we're capping the market," he added.
If passed, the new anti-gun legislation will fine gun smuggling and trafficking "by increasing maximum criminal penalties and providing more tools for law enforcement to investigate firearm crimes," Trudeau said.
The new legislation would also require that long gun magazines "can never" hold more than five rounds.
"Gun violence is a complex problem, but at the end of the day the math is really quite simple: The fewer the guns in our communities, the safer everyone will be," the Prime Minister said.
On Sept. 14, 1989, a disgruntled employee entered the Standard Gravure printing plant in downtown Louisville and, armed with an AK-47 and other guns, killed eight and wounded 12 others before taking his own life — in what remains the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.
At the time, mass shootings had not yet become the staple of American life that they are now, and McConnell said he was “deeply disturbed,” declaring, “We must take action to stop such vicious crimes.”
But he also added: “We need to be careful about legislating in the middle of a crisis.” And in the days and weeks after, he did not join others in calling for a ban on assault weapons like the AK-47 used by the shooter.
The Standard Gravure massacre provided an early glimpse of how McConnell — now the Republican Senate minority leader — would handle mass shootings and their aftermath over the next three decades, consistently working to delay, obstruct or prevent most major gun-control legislation from passing Congress.
McConnell would go on to follow a similar playbook time and time again during his seven terms in Congress, offering vague promises of action, often without any specifics, only to be followed by no action or incremental measures that avoided new gun regulations. As a Republican leader, he also helped dissuade his conference — as after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — from supporting gun legislation and, as majority leader, refused to bring up significant gun-control measures for a vote.
A resident of Bremerton, Washington is calling foul after being accosted by a Trump supporter at his doorstep over potential "voter fraud."
As the Seattle Times reports, an organization called the Washington Voter Research Project has been sending canvassers door to door to ask residents about their voter registration status in an effort to find "voter fraud" in the state.
Bremerton resident Michael Simonds tells the newspaper that he came away disturbed after one canvasser came to his door recently and "kind of went off the deep end" when she started ranting about undocumented immigrants and forging ballot signatures.
"It seemed like a misinformation campaign," he said.
Even more disturbingly, Simonds said that the woman falsely implied she was there on behalf of the county auditor's office, which is something that Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton tells the Seattle Times is simply not true.
O Canada! What a difference a border makes.
