High-Powered Sniper Rifles to Go Unregistered

With the long-gun registry set to die, you can soon own a .50-calibre sniper rifle that can drop a man from a mile away without having to register it with anybody.

Good news, gun fans! The end of the long-gun registry means that you'll no longer have to worry about registering such handy little weapons as the IWI Tavor T.A.R. 21 5.56mm, the Steyr HS .50, and the Ruger Mini-14, the semi-automatic rifle used in both the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre and Anders Behring Breivik's Norwegian slaughter this year! The Toronto Star reports that these are among the high-powered sniper rifles and semi-automatics that you used to have to register, but no more. (Well, once the bill passes through the House of Commons.) We're no gun experts, but we have played a lot of first-person shooter video games, and let's just say this little selection of rifles looks more like the kind of weaponry used to fell members of the Taliban than the kind you'd use to hunt deer or pheasants in rural Ontario. For example, the Steyr HS .50 can drop someone in light armour from up to 1.5 kilometres away. But what do we know, right? Just because a rifle is designed to tear a hole the size of a grapefruit through a man's chest doesn't mean that's what it's going to be used for.