A gun amnesty has been successful locally.
At the Vernon-North Okanagan detachment, 32 firearms were turned over to police during an October amnesty program. This included 14 rifles, nine handguns, seven shotguns, one pellet/replica gun and one restored firearm.
Const. Jocelyn Noseworthy says guns turned over locally are largely destroyed.
“We keep a small number for educational and training purposes,” she said.
A total of 1,184 firearms were returned provincewide to the RCMP as part of the October gun amnesty.
“The firearms that were retrieved included 543 rifles, 223 shotguns and 222 handguns,” said Chief Const. Les Sylvan, with the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police.
“In addition, British Columbians also asked police to remove thousands of rounds of ammunition, limited explosives and a large number of replicas.”
This is the third gun amnesty the province has held in the past decade. The previous two were in 2006 and 2013 and yielded more than 5,000 firearms.
The event operated on a no questions asked basis unless the guns were involved in criminal proceedings, said Sylvan.
— with files from Katya Slepian, Black Press