For a chunk of stamped metal not much bigger than a pack of cards, there’s a lot of discussion – in one Canadian gun subculture – of the LAR-15 magazine, a device made by an Illinois-based arms company that can hold up to 10 cartridges to be fed into a semi-automatic rifle. (The current law seems designed to limit rifles to a magazine capacity of five rounds.)
Much of it involves gun retailers assuring potential customers, and gun owners assuring each other, that it is in fact legal. One retailer selling the magazines posts a legal ruling from the RCMP, downloadable as a .pdf, designed to reassure potential customers that they will not be sent to a federal prison for up to five years for possession of a prohibited device, but can order it with a good conscience for $27.99 plus tax and shipping.
“Such is the way our laws are written,” the explanation ends.
So: are they legal to own? Are they legal to fire from a rifle (another point that gets debated)? And why the edginess?
They’re certainly legal, says says Ottawa-based firearms lawyer Solomon Friedman: “I don’t think there’s any debate about the legality. It’s complicated, and people don’t understand it, but legally it’s very well-settled.”
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In the ambitious reform of Canada’s gun laws that followed the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, semi-automatic rifles (other than .22s) were limited to a magazine capacity of five rounds – or so it seemed at the time. Magazines come much larger – the military uses a 30-round rifle magazine, and in some parts of the United States, these are commercially available.
In Canada, semi-automatic pistols are limited to a 10-round magazine.
“They cut down the large-scale magazines so that you don’t have an individual that’s going berserk, trying to kill too many people at once,” explains Doug Carlson, a retired OPP staff sergeant who worked as a regional firearms officer in Ontario for six years. “It limits the amount of time in which somebody can fire a number of rounds before he can reload. The idea is that when he reloads, somebody has the opportunity to escape, or take drastic action.”
| Magazines designed for one firearm but used in a different firearm The maximum permitted capacity of a magazine is determined by the kind of firearm it is designed or manufactured for use in and not the kind of firearm it might actually be used in. As a consequence, the maximum permitted capacity remains the same regardless of which firearm it might be used in. Example: The Marlin model 45 (Camp Carbine) rifle chambered for 45 Auto caliber uses magazines designed and manufactured for the Colt 1911 handgun, therefore the seven round and eight round capacities are permitted. A similar example is the 10 round capacity magazine for the Rock River Arms LAR-15 pistol, regardless of the kind of firearm it is actually used in. RCMP Canadian Firearms Program Special Bulletin for Businesses No. 72 |
In time, however, a careful reading of the letter of the law revealed a loophole.
Rock River Arms, a firearms maker based in Colona, Ill., makes a gun called an LAR-15 Pistol, that looks more or less like a miniature AR-15 rifle. Designed to be fired with one hand, it fires a 5.56mm bullet – a common rifle cartridge – and uses a magazine which can fit many rifles. In Canada, it is legally classified as a pistol.
They retail in the U.S. for about $1,000.
There are a total of 71 LAR-15 pistols chambered in 5.56 actually registered in Canada, but lots of Canadian gun retailers selling magazines designed for them – many more than one would think the limited market would bear. A quick Google search easily turns up half a dozen online sources from Vancouver to St. John’s.
“Magazines are classified not by which firearms thay are used in, but what firearms they are designed for,” Friedman says. “For example, if a magazine designed for a pistol happens to fit in a rifle, there is no problem using it in that rifle, even though you now have a semi-automatic centre-fire rifle with a ten-round capacity.”
So, if it will fit in the rifle, a gun owner is perfectly entitled to fire this ten-round magazine, but not necessarily any others (that might well be illegal), because it was produced for a firearm that it was possible to define as a handgun.
Many gun retailers also sell a wedge-shaped device (which Friedman calls “absolutely legal”) designed to connect two LAR-15 magazines together, bottom-to-bottom. Flipping the attached magazines between rounds 10 and 11 and releasing the bolt, a shooter can get close to the capability of a 20-round magazine – in a YouTube demonstration, a man using two LAR-15 magazines in an Israeli-designed assault rifle fires 20 rounds in 16 seconds.
“There’s a gun culture that wants to skate around what would normally be a clear-cut law,” Carlson says. “It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, why they would allow it, but they’ve clearly allowed it. I’m sure they could tidy this up quite easily with legislation.”
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