Cannonball handed over during gun amnesty month

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This article was published 12/06/2018 (2891 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An anonymous Winnipegger has handed police an exploding cannonball.

The old bomb, which weighs four kilograms, was turned over on Monday as part of the provincewide gun amnesty month.

“It was recovered by a citizen in 1966 while visiting York Factory,” a tweet from the Winnipeg Police Service says. “The factory was an old trading post and the site of some naval battles between the French (and) English.”

York Factory, nearly 900 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, was a trading post, and later, a major administrative centre in the Hudson’s Bay Co. fur trade network, according to Historica Canada, which also cites the community as having witnessed the largest naval battle to take place in Arctic Canada.

The finding comes one week after a non-operational military bomb was retreived from a Portage la Prairie basement.

Manitobans are asked to call their local police service’s non-emergency line to schedule a pickup or drop-off appointment. Police won’t lay charges on people returning weapons all June (even if a gun isn’t registered), unless the weapon was stolen or used to commit a crime.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie