r/canadaguns • u/bcscroller • 10d ago
Misc Why so little choice in sporting shotguns in Canada compared to the UK?
I was in the UK recently and walked into a gun room packed to the rafters with new and used shotguns, at great prices. The staff were extremely friendly, very well-informed and attentive. They had Berettas, Guerinis, Mirokus, Perazzis, English SxS, sporting and field models, ranging from 50 GBP (beater guns, but safe to use) to 35,000 GBP, all on the rack and available to handle, all priced transparently and fairly. Where used Canadian equivalents exist, they were almost double the cost. Customers were utterly spoilt for choice and that one gun room had more available than I have found at all online retailers in Canada combined. I would have walked out with about 10 guns, gladly paying what was on the tag. What gives? The UK isn't exactly considered pro-gun, and has a reputation for being expensive as a shopping destination. Why do we have such slim pickings in comparison?
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u/Hot_Cheesecake_905 10d ago edited 10d ago
The 1968 Firearms Act makes it easier to own a shotgun than a rifle, and shotgun sports are popular among the gentry there. Plus, there are several British shotgun manufacturers.
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u/Creative-Ad9092 10d ago
Ex-pat Brit here. It’s a cultural thing. Shotguns are exponentially more popular than rifles in the UK. The fact that a Shotgun Certificate is a lot easier to get than a Firearms Certificate doesn’t hurt either. We had four informal weekend clay shoots within a 30 minute drive of our home in North Somerset, plus two excellent clay grounds. Rifle clubs were a bit harder to find- but were there all the same.
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u/Eglitarian 10d ago
Consider what the best selling guns in Canada are right now (Turkish 22s) and that’ll explain why most vendors aren’t going to want to sit on a $65000 shotgun.
Plus most of our firearm store stock is geared towards plinking, sport target shooting, and hunting. Any time I go to the trap or sporting clays range I’m the youngest in my mid thirties by decades. Most of the old guys have their expensive O/Us already and there’s not exactly an influx of people to the sport.
Clay shooting is also way more of a significant part of UK shooting culture/sports than it is over here. We’re more likely to spend shotgun money on a 1301 that we can use for bird hunting and target shooting as well as clays.
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u/Azuvector bc 9d ago
Honestly, clays would be a lot more popular without fudd rules. You shoot with a shotgun. Who gives a damn what barrel length or attachments(if any) it has, provided you're being safe which is applicable to all guns? Yet there are ranges that forbid things arbitrarily.
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u/Eglitarian 9d ago
Yeah I shoot with a pump action with a 28” field barrel which works more than fine for trap and honestly isn’t what’s holding me back from true pair sporting clays as much as my accuracy (I’ve never been too slow to fire on the clays).
As with 90% of the things it feels like are holding back range memberships, the old guard needs to give up on needlessly antiquated conventions or die out and make room for the younger generations.
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u/Previous_Search3122 7d ago
Our clay house was shot by someone shooting an M4 clone. 5 years of running trap and skeet without an issue, the first guy with one comes out and smokes the front of the clay house.
Our range doesn't care what barrel length or gauge your shooting, but the tacti-cool shotguns with tall sights aren't welcome on the range.
Break guns are also considerably safer for everyone on those ranges and can easily be distinguishable as safe from a distance. We have a couple guys that shoot autoloader a, and the new guys will come with their pump guns, but by far most of the people shooting trap or clays are shooting break guns.
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u/Azuvector bc 7d ago
The problem is the person, not the gun. You've heard this before unless you have your head in the sand, and it applies to this as well. I've seen people shoot perfect games with shortie pumps with red dots on them. You don't magically shoot the ground because you have a tacticool firearm, you shoot the ground because you're an idiot.
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u/Previous_Search3122 7d ago
Unfortunately that type of person generally shows up with one of those guns to show clays.
Yes their is exceptions, we aren't talking about those.
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u/Agonizing-Stroke1812 10d ago
Interesting. My local range has seen a massive uptick in trap shooters of all ages since it's effectively the only accessible "shooting game" these days given what we can purchase and shoot. Albeit most of them are just shooting their standard hunting or tactical shotguns and it's super casual
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u/yycmobiletires 10d ago
Because shotguns are pretty much all you can own in the uk as far as I know lol. Even then there's heavy restrictions on what and why you can own them.
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u/LongRoadNorth 10d ago
They can own handguns and ar actually. Similar to our old laws where heavily regulated/restricted
I follow a few UK based shooting channels they can own plenty we can't.
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u/Fancybear1993 ns 10d ago
Yeah the argument could be made that broadly what we are currently able to purchase is actually more restrictive than the restrictions on mainland Great Britain.
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u/LongRoadNorth 10d ago
I think Australia is the only one worse than us right now. Much of Europe can own significantly more than us.
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u/Fancybear1993 ns 10d ago
At least you can still own pistols there, and some states don’t have mag restrictions 🙃
Edit: with long arms, pistols are restricted to 10
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u/LongRoadNorth 10d ago
Ya. Sadly think we're one of the few with handgun ban
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u/Fancybear1993 ns 10d ago
Yeah I genuinely can’t think of a single western country with a complete ban on purchasing handguns nationwide across all jurisdictions.
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u/waitwhatnothing 10d ago
In a way you can argue that our exemption system is similar to how most countries handle handguns, although a little bit more restrictive. In Australia, NZ and most European countries handguns and sometimes also ARs or PCCs require club membership and regular competition results to own.
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u/Fancybear1993 ns 9d ago
Our exemption system is far more restrictive than those countries mentioned. some require regular competition but most don’t.
Most of those countries regulations are more similar to our pre Justin era.
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u/Spydude84 10d ago
Last I checked their handguns needed to have really long barrels and overall lengths and their ARs needed to be manual actions or .22lrs.
Both of those are more than we can get right now, for sure, but saying handguns and ARs isn't the full story I think.
Happy to be wrong if my understanding is incorrect.
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u/LongRoadNorth 10d ago
I know one YouTuber from the UK who I've seen using a 556 AR plenty and handguns around 4.5"
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u/Spydude84 10d ago
Link?
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u/LongRoadNorth 10d ago
Search Joncresswelluk
Haven't seen him post in a while though
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u/Spydude84 10d ago
I just scrolled through all his videos and thumbnails. Everything I can see is a manual action of some sort (bolt, straight pull) or .22lr semi autos. I didn't see a single handgun of any size.
Can you be more specific about which video it is that you're seeing this in?
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u/chillyrabbit 10d ago
Cap and ball revolvers are legal. So those wouldn't have goofy barrels. Though since its a FAC firearm you would need a reason to own it.
Section 7 pistols; which are either old historically significant pistols before 1919 or historically significant. Not every pistol is significant though.
But on /r/guns a user has a section 7.3 military trial springfield XD
https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/33uui1/section_73_is_a_wonderful_thing_uk_legally_owned/
Semi-automatic rifles have to be rimfire, so they can go up to 22 wmr or 17hmr and those kind of cartiridges.
Also one that I remember significantly is a UK gun owner owning a saiga 12 shotgun https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/qg5mw5/i_think_it_would_be_fair_to_say_at_this_point/
That would be prohibited as a name banned AK firearm in Canada.
Basically the biggest plus the UK has is that they don't have any name banned firearms. Which in Canada hits a lot of firearms that UK gun owners have that we don't.
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u/Spydude84 10d ago
Yeah, that's fair, but cap and ball revolvers aren't what I would consider to be modern handguns and Canada also allows old revolvers too. There's some edge cases, but the reality is that edge cases tend to be expensive or not particularly fun. Saying "they can own handguns" does not imply (only) old historical relics lol.
Also, rimfire is a solid distinction here, albeit .22lr is the most common one, so you're technically more right about that, albeit... the reality is that most are going to be .22lr.
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u/Fancybear1993 ns 10d ago
Honestly I’d take owning cap and ball revolvers, silly coat hanger pistols and manual action aks and ars (for style obviously) over what we have now.
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u/waitwhatnothing 10d ago
The licensing system is way more convoluted there, which is something most people aren’t considering. Once you have a firearms license (as opposed to a shotgun certificate) you are asking for permission to buy a gun each time and providing a reason. If it’s too similar to something you already own it can be denied unless you sell the similar gun you have. How much scrutiny there is on those applications also varies depending on the local authorities.
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u/Fancybear1993 ns 9d ago
Oh 100%. The system there is complete bureaucratic dogshit. I’m commenting on the breadth of what can be bought currently.
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u/airchinapilot 10d ago
Because all they can have are shotguns practically. Hunting wise, they have hardly any big game and if they do, they relatively few wild places to shoot rifle. And pistols a long time ago were limited to those ones with the fused stock that made them into 'rifles'. But they can otherwise hunt the same type of birds we do: duck, goose, pheasant, etc.
They have a long tradition of sporting and hunting shotgun sports and have better access to Europe than we do. All of our traditional clay sports came out of UK.
Their shotgun regulations actually allow a bit more leeway than ours do in that they have no limit for semi auto if you have the Firearms Certificate which they have no mag limit for IF you can get that certificate which you can get if you convince local constabulary you compete in UKPSA. (The less stringent permit for Shotgun allows you to get the standard 3-shell capacity shotguns).
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u/LongRoadNorth 10d ago
There's a few stores you can see a fair amount but nothing like the UK will have.
That said, go to the Canadian open or some other sporting Clay events and there's tons to see.
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u/bcscroller 10d ago
Store recommendations? I’ve been checking Italian Sporting Goods, Reliable Gun, Intersurplus, the Gun Dealer, Gunpost and Prophet River.
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u/flange2016 10d ago
Silver Willows retails a decent stock of sporting shotguns. Bilizor carries some as well but limited brand choices.
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u/bcscroller 10d ago
Excellent answers, thank you. I was aware that I was in a place where shotgun sports are more of a thing and I know landed gentry/culture/licensing comes into it heavily but going into an Aladdin’s cave like that - well, I was unprepared.
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u/waitwhatnothing 9d ago
The other thing is that the number of shotgun certificate holders is shrinking in the UK so there is a bit of an oversupply of older and less desirable guns on the market.
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u/StairwayHiker 10d ago
If you call importers like Wolverine Supplies they can get you pretty much anything.
But agreed, there are no retail stores you can walk into that have highest end shotguns.
My dad is a retired senior commercial banker (his job doesn’t exist these days)…. Anyways, he had a very wealthy client that shot competitive trap all over North America. This was 40 years ago and he said, “The only thing more expensive than competitive trap is raising polo ponies.” And of course he knew because men he associated with in the sport actually raised polo ponies.
Even just to shoot a couple of rounds of trap at the local range it is too expensive for most shooters. The middle class has been priced out of shooting sports.
My dad was only able to shoot competitive IDPA because he reloaded all his ammo from scratch back when it actually made financial sense to do so…. But even now handgun reloading is barely cheaper than buying factory ammo.
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u/Not-a-Cranky-Panda 10d ago
In Canada people come in and buy them, in the UK there are far less as a % people there who can buy them. Lots of police Forces in the UK are not given out Shotgun certificates so lot have to be sold to gunshops who now have way too many, so the price is very low.
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u/Previous_Search3122 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think shotgun sports arent the cool in thing right now. PRS has really taken that on and it's great.
Skeet is my game, I wish we saw more shooting in my area so there would be more access and variety in my area. Sporting Clays also looks very fun, but there are no public ranges anywhere close to me, talking multiple multiple hours distance.
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u/jay370gt 9d ago
Must be a cultural thing. Nobody buys a Range Rover with a shotgun / alcohol chest in the trunk in Canada.
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