Competitive handgun shooters say federal ban signals end of their sport

Canada's competitive handgun shooters say their sport is dying, with no newcomers entering the field after the federal government banned the sale and transfer of handguns for personal use in 2023.

Handgun owners can keep their firearms, but cannot replace weapons that are lost, stolen, or broken—cutting off the pipeline of athletes needed to sustain the sport. The International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) has roughly 6,000 Canadian members, but the ban has prompted warnings that the sport will atrophy within a decade.

Glen Miller, a competitive shooter at a May 30 event south of Fort McMurray, told CBC News the situation is difficult to accept. "It's tough to stomach something that I've invested many thousands of dollars in and many hundreds of hours in … for that just to go away from the stroke of a pen," he said.

John Evers, a board member with the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, was blunt: "Handgun shooting sports is dead. We are just waiting for the corpse to cool."

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the freeze in 2023, arguing that "the fewer the guns in our communities, the safer everyone will be." According to Statistics Canada, handguns were used in 49 percent of violent crimes involving firearms in 2024, and more than half of illegal handguns seized by police were smuggled from the United States.

The government granted exemptions for athletes competing in Olympic and Paralympic events—which use less powerful handguns than IPSC competitions—but rejected similar exemptions for practical shooting sports. When IPSC members lobbied the Standing Senate Committee on Public Safety in 2022, gun control advocates including Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, argued that exemptions would create loopholes.

Shooters say they're caught between policy and passion, with no path forward.