The gun alleged college killer Kimveer Gill displays proudly on his blog is a restricted firearm under Canadian law but popular with the country's shooting fraternity.
“To be perfectly honest it's a lot of fun to shoot,” said Tony Bernardo, executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, who also owns a Beretta CX4 Storm.
“The little pistol calibre it comes in gives virtually no recoil. It's very accurate. The firearm is just one of those firearms that's just a lot of fun to spend a day at the range with.”
Mr. Gill, 25, has been identified in news reports as the man who entered Montreal's Dawson College on Wednesday and opened fire with what some witnesses described as an assault rifle.
A young woman was killed and 20 more people wounded, several of them critically.
Mr. Gill, a resident of suburban Laval, Que., is shown in some 50 photos on his vampirefreaks.com blog playing with a Beretta CX4 Storm.
It's not a rifle but a semi-automatic carbine, a gun smaller than a rifle that uses pistol ammunition and is popular on Canadian shooting ranges.
“It doesn't have a huge muzzle blast,” Bernardo said from Oshawa, Ont. “It doesn't recoil you back into next week. It's just a fun little gun that people go out and shoot tin cans at the range with.
“Those people who own them are a little horrified at this particular moment. Nobody envisions that this thing would be used in that manner. That's not what it was made for.”
The association, which lobbies against tougher gun restrictions, posted a message of condolence on its website Thursday.
The Storm, a product of famed Italian gunmaker Beretta, sells for around $1,000 in Canada. It's available in nine-millimetre, .40 and .45 calibres.
Under Canadian gun laws it's treated the same as a handgun, meaning the owner must have a firearms acquisitions licence and a permit to own a restricted weapon, both of which require background checks.
Beretta's product literature extols the Storm's futuristic looks and light weight, thanks to liberal use of tough plastic materials.
However, its 2.5-kilogram heft is enough to easily absorb recoil from the pistol ammunition it uses.
The Storm is popular with U.S. law-enforcement agencies, said Bernardo, because it uses the same ammunition magazine as the Beretta 92 pistol, which is standard issue in the U.S. military and among many police forces.
It can't be used for hunting, which limits its legitimate civilian use strictly to casual target shooting.
“It fits a very narrow niche,” said Mr. Bernardo. “It isn't something that you use for competition target-shooting, nor is it as described in the media an assault rifle.”
Semi-auto carbines like the storm fall into a legal grey area because, although restricted like a handgun, it's classified as a rifle by Ottawa's Canada Firearms Centre.
The centre issued a bulletin last fall warning that the Storm's new 10-round magazine must be modified to hold only five rounds, the limit for semi-auto rifles.
However, the bulletin says the 10-round pistol magazine that comes with earlier-production Storms is still legal.
Most gun ranges restrict shooters to loading five rounds, Mr. Bernardo said.
He said he is not worried the Dawson College shooting will prompt Ottawa to add the Storm to its prohibited gun list.
He noted the Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle, used by Marc Lepine to kill 15 women in the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique shooting, remains unrestricted. It's a popular hunting rifle and is also issued to the armed forces' Inuit Rangers.
8
