BERNARDO: While criminal gangs fire hundreds of rounds at homes — Ottawa targets law-abiding gun owners

From Ontario’s Peel Region, to Surrey and Abbotsford, BC, to Edmonton, Alberta, the pattern is impossible to dismiss.Extortion. Shootings. Arson. Cross-border smuggling networks.Illegal firearms are moving between provinces faster than police can trace them.Yet Mark Carney’s Liberal government remains fixated on confiscating firearms from licenced firearms owners, not organized criminals.Peel Regional Police arrested 17 people in connection with an international extortion network known as For Brothers, which police say targeted South Asian business owners and community members across Peel Region and the United States.Investigators linked 16 violent incidents to For Brothers, including arson and multiple shootings involving 324 rounds fired.That is organized intimidation, and it’s a plague on our nation.In Surrey, BC, police investigated an extortion-related shooting after bullets hit an occupied home in Newton around 4:00 AM on May 20. Police said a person associated with the home had previously been the victim of an extortion threat.Const. Kevin St. Louis, a police witness at a 2025 Immigration and Refugee Board hearing, testified that the Lawrence Bishnoi gang sent a letter to an Abbotsford police station last year claiming it had over 1,000 people willing to commit violence on their behalf.Sgt. Paul Walker, of the Abbotsford Police Department, confirmed the letter..That number may be grandiose boasting, intimidation, or propaganda, but even if the claim is exaggerated, the public safety problem the gang represents is not.The Bishnoi Gang is listed as a terrorist entity. Public Safety Canada describes it as “a transnational criminal organization” with a presence in Canada, active in diaspora communities, involved in extortion, intimidation, murder, shootings, and arson.That is not a hunting, sport shooting, or PAL holder problem.That is organized crime on a massive scale.“The pace at which these firearms are being moved between different provinces made it very difficult to locate and seize many of these firearms,” Const. St. Louis said.In one case, a gun was reportedly used in extortion shootings in two provinces within 24 hours.That’s the firearms crisis Canadian politicians should be talking about, but are not.Police are dealing with encrypted communications, foreign-based extortion demands, copycat groups, international phone numbers, immigration enforcement issues, financial trails, violent intimidation, and firearms moving through criminal channels.Meanwhile, Ottawa keeps claiming licenced firearms owners are the epicentre of the problem, likely because they are so easy to target.Licenced owners answer government letters. Criminal extortion networks do not..Licenced owners take safety courses, pass background checks, obey storage rules, and live under a system where yesterday’s legal property can become tomorrow’s political target.Criminal extortion networks fire hundreds of rounds into private homes and businesses.That’s the contradiction and the hypocrisy of the Liberal government’s position.They claim their firearms confiscation scheme is about public safety, yet that scheme completely ignores the real violence being driven by organized criminal networks.Canada now has multiple public reports describing extortion-linked shootings, arson, organized crime networks, and illegal firearms moving across jurisdictions with ease.Canada has no shortage of laws for the law-abiding.It has a shortage of political honesty about who is actually driving violent gun crime.Licenced firearms owners are not the people firing 324 rounds into Canadian communities, or sending bullets into occupied homes at 4:00 AM.They’re not the people moving extortion guns between provinces, either..Organized criminals are the problem that Ottawa refuses to face.True public safety begins when the government does the hard and dangerous work of dismantling organized criminal networks that seem to operate with impunity today.We applaud the police forces across the country that do this hard work, while Liberal Ottawa continues to blame the easiest people to regulate.That fact explains why so many police forces and provinces across Canada refuse to participate in the Liberal government’s firearms confiscation compensation scheme.They know what this Liberal government cannot admit: licenced firearms owners were never the issue. They’re just convenient scapegoats.Violent criminals and their smuggling and extortion networks are the problem.At some point, the violence will escalate on a scale that even Mark Carney’s Liberal government will no longer be able to ignore.And on that day, after all the legal guns are confiscated, who will Mark Carney’s government blame next?

BERNARDO: While criminal gangs fire hundreds of rounds at homes — Ottawa targets law-abiding gun owners

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