Firearms for Toronto's Summer of the Gun don't all come from the US

As Toronto stumbles through another Summer of the Gun - this is shaping up to be its most violent year since 2005 - and another rogue gunman walks through a busy commercial street spraying the summer evening crowd with bullets, everyone is still aghast at how many guns there are sloshing around this erstwhile peaceful and safe city.

Canada has always prided itself on being "Not America", and certainly our gun control laws are much more stringent than those in the US. The perceived wisdom is that the guns used in Canadian crimes and gang activities are shipped here by criminals and gangs in the States. The truth about Toronto's and Canada's guns, though, is not so simple.

According to the RCMP, there are over a million prohibited and restricted guns in Canada, most of them pistols (handguns), and 375,000 of these can be found in Ontario (and most of those presumably in Toronto). This is well over twice the number reported just 13 years ago, in 2005, the last time we had a national crisis about gun ownership. In total, there is an estimated 12.7 million long and short guns in Canada, equivalent to 35.7 for every man woman and child. This represents one of the highest rates of firearm ownership in the world. More than 2 million people are licensed to possess and buy guns (which means that some individuals have a LOT of guns).

The number of firearms-related incidents in Canada has been on the increase over the last few years, and 6 in 10 violent firearm crimes are now committed with a hand-gun. About 42% of the gun-related crimes were for unlawfully firing a gun, 40% for pointing a weapon, and most of the remainder for "the use of a firearm in the commission of an indictable offence".

Toronto, with by far the largest population of any Canadian city, is of course the location of the most shootings and homicides: there were 92 homicides last year, compared to 52 in Vancouver, 49 in Edmonton and 46 in Montreal, and there have already been 58 homicides in Toronto in the first 7 months of this year, 29 of which were shootings, which is on course to rival 2005, the original "Year of the Gun", which saw 53 deaths by shootings (there were just 17 gun homicides in Toronto last year). There have been 228 shootings in total this year in Toronto, compared to just 84 last year, although some simple arithmetic shows that the vast majority of them were not fatal.
If we look the average rate of homicides, though, Toronto's 1.47 per 100,000 people is way below places like Thunder Bay (5.8), Abbotsford (4.7) and Mission (4.7), and even well below the national average of 1.8. Toronto is always well down Statistics Canada's Crime Severity Index. Nevertheless, the recent Danforth shootings this has of course led to more calls for a handgun ban, and a general tightening of gun control in the country, after the ill-advised relaxation of various elements of our gun control legislation under Stephen Harper. This seems like an obvious first step of many that need to be taken, and this idea is apparently being taken quite seriously by the federal government.

But where do all these guns actually come from, anyway? Yes, a lot of guns do come into Canada from the US. However, although statistics suggest that 91% of the guns seized at the USA/Canada border are taken from American residents, those that are seized from Canadians after a short trip over the border are apparently much more likely to be associated with illicit use. There are also "ghost guns" or 80% weapons", unfinished firearms with no identifying marks or serial numbers, usual bought over the internet and thus unregulated, which can be converted into working guns by the addition of other parts (also available on the good old internet). It's a whole world of intrigue and skullduggery I had no idea existed.

A recent report for the British Columbia government found that up to 60% of guns used in BC crimes were in fact purchased, traded or stolen in Canada, usually obtained by people with no criminal record and then sold to gangs on the black market, all within Canada. According to the Toronto Police, the equivalent statistic in Toronto is around 50%, sharply up from about 30% not many years ago. So, half of the guns being used in the city are indeed "home-grown".

So, although Canada does not have the same kind of rampant gun culture as the USA, it's pretty clear that we do need to clean up of our own house before casting aspersions and laying blame south of the border. And let's not kid ourselves that banning handguns will miraculously solve the problem (Washington and Chicago banned handguns for years to little or no effect), although we should probably still do that (the experiences of Australia, Germany and Britain suggest that it CAN be effective). And anyway, if Faisal Hussein had not had access to a gun, he could still have just driven a van along Danforth Avenue, or obtained a machete or something.