Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

You Aren’t Going To Believe How Many Guns This Former Politician Was Busted With

(U.S. Army)

A former member of Canada’s Parliament was arrested on July 7 after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) claimed three of the firearms in his collection of over 400 were “trafficked.”

Inky Mark, who served as a member of Parliament from 1997 to 2010, was arrested on charges of gun trafficking, possessing unauthorized devices and unsafe storage involving the 439 firearms and an ancient cannon in his collection, according to a Monday release from the RCMP. The agency told the Daily Caller News Foundation that their probe began after a March tip from the United States about a separate individual.

“He was arrested for firearms trafficking and was subsequently charged for additional storage offences,” a RCMP spokesperson told the DCNF about the 78-year-old Mark, who fled from Communist China in 1953. “It is legal in Canada to have as many firearms as you want provided you are licensed to do so, they are safely stored, and the weapons are legally permissible to own in this country. In this instance, officers have so far found three firearms that were illegally trafficked, one that had its serial number tampered with and hundreds of firearms that were improperly stored.”

Photos provided by the RCMP showed what appeared to be a variety of firearms in a walk-in closet, including modern semiautomatic rifles, revolvers and semiautomatic pistols. The National Firearms Association (NFA), a Canadian gun-rights organization, declined to comment on the arrest, although a spokesperson hinted that the collection was not unusual.

Mark was apparently hostile to gun laws, writing to the Western Producer in 2012 that he felt “all firearm laws should be removed from the criminal code,” according to a CBC report.

In 2022, the Canadian Parliament passed legislation known as C-21 that banned modern semiautomatic firearms and implemented a “freeze” on handguns, including a plan to launch an Australian-style “buy back” of the banned rifles and shotguns. So far, there have been reports of massive non-compliance with the law from Canadian gun owners.

The NFA spokesperson told the DCNF that even though Manitoba’s provincial government is led by the left-wing New Democratic Party, it is not cooperating with the federal gun-grabbing efforts.