Illegal Importation of Firearms into Canada From the United States

"Our problem in Toronto are handguns from the United States." 

"The issues around investing in what you described is certainly not going to deal with the crime problem we're facing in Toronto, as it relates to the use of criminal handguns."

Toronto Police Deputy Chief Myron Demkiw

"We see handguns in Saskatchewan, but predominantly most of the crime is committed by long-barrelled rifles."

"In Alberta and Manitoba it's very similar, a lot of those guns are coming from break-and-enters. The work we need to do there comes down to education of people on safe storage, and not to have those guns stolen from a farmhouse and then converted and used in crimes."

"I'm not going to say there isn't a problem from time to time with legal gun owners [alluding to the practise known as 'straw purchasing' where licensed gun owners sell their legally bought firearms on the black market]."

"But generally speaking, most of the laws we create are not going to be followed by the people who are committing the crimes with the guns."

"We have a ban on murder in Canada, and yet sadly we still have homicides happening all the time."

Regina Police Chief Evan Bray

"Law enforcement officials are the actual experts when it comes to crime and street violence."

"When none of them support the idea of banning legal guns from licensed owners in an effort to reduce street crime, I think it's an obligation of the government to listen to that."

Tracey Wilson, vice-president, public affairs, Canadian Coalition for Firearms rights

A Glock handgun seized by Toronto police earlier this year. The small cube on the rear of the firearm is an illegal ‘sear switch’ that allows the semi-automatic handgun to fire full-auto. Photo by Toronto police/Twitter /@TPSGunsSeized

 

In testimony before the Commons [House of Commons] Public Safety Committee, police chiefs of Canadian cities are critical of gun legislation that appears to target legal gun owners for the avowed purpose of addressing the phenomenon of growing gun crimes in Canadian cities. Mostly weapons in the hands of criminal gangs, where shoot-outs endanger innocent civilians, including children. 

The Toronto deputy-chief responded to a question relating to the Trudeau Liberals' close to billion-dollar federal buyback program that allows legal gun owners to turn in their 'military-style assault rifles' banned by Ottawa a year ago. Deputy Chief Demkiw informed the committee that aside from addressing key causes of criminality in the community, the effort and funds involved should be spent on stemming the flow of illegal guns into Canada.

The government stands accused of gun control measures that tend to punish law-abiding Canadian firearm owners in a wide-ranging plan to diminish the number of firearms owned by the public, in the process seeming to bypass the real source of crime guns which are by and large firearms readily smuggled across the border into Canada from the United States.

 

Toronto Police Service Guns Seized #offthestreets

 

A cost estimate of the buy-back program published by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated costs at $756 million. Program spending increased by another $8.8 million according to a recent Department of Public Safety quarterly report. Local handgun bans being explored by many cities including Toronto following the federal government's stated intention of working with provincial and territorial leaders to allow such bans, may soon come into effect.

Toronto has seen a steady and steep rise in shootings, including the number of shots fired where Toronto police recovered 2,405 shell casings in 2021; a 50 percent increase from the year before. Higher capacity and  higher-power firearms are making more frequent appearances, as can be verified by the Toronto Police 'guns seized' Twitter account. Three handguns seized by investigators in February featured a Taurus G2C and two Glocks.

Nine firearm banned models intended on criminalizing variants of the popularAR-15 platform came into effect on May1, 2020. Seized guns cannot be legally purchased and owned in Canada; the Glocks seized had been given a selector switch on the rear cover plate to convert the semi-automatic pistols into full-auto, mini submachine guns.

Most of the guns Toronto police seized in 2022 were either prohibited or had overcapacity magazines; illegally modified to hold more than the legally permitted ten rounds, or purchased in the United States and smuggled into Canada. The scope of gun crime varies, all the more so when comparing the Prairie provinces to the Lower Mainland of British Columbia or the Greater Toronto Area. 

Inexorably the connection between gun crime and the criminal drug trade links organized criminality. An entirely separate issue is that of legal gun owners. As for enacting gun bans, it was pointed out,  the citizenry have to buy into it. Canada's gun lobby has long since called for measures to bypass punishing law-abiding firearms owners. Not only those who collect and shoot guns as a sporting hobby, but more to the point, the fact that most farmers own a rifle.

A restricted gun licence holder holds a AR-15 at his home in Langley, B.C.  Photo by The Canadian Press 

Toronto's Mental Health and Firearms Problem

"Doctors said that worst-case scenario she's in a wheelchair with the use of her arms and torso, and best-case scenario she's going to be walking with an aid or a walker of some sort."
"I've been through some emotional distress but Danielle right now is suffering from potentially a lifelong deficit, so I want to make sure that people recognize how selfless she was, trying to race out there and help someone, not knowing what we were going to meet outside the door."
"Those compassionate, selfless tendencies, they're why we fell in love, and that's why we're together right now."
"I just had this overwhelming feeling that I have the training, I have the knowledge, I can help this victim. I looked across the street and I made eye contact with the shooter. I kept walking, he was so calm I didn't even think about it. Then I heard a clicking sound and I looked back again and that's when he raised his hands very quickly and opened fire."
"She [Danielle Kane] said it was the most pain she had ever experienced and she couldn't feel her legs. [Doctors said] she had quite extensive internal damage with a spinal cord injury. We won't know exactly what the severity is until she starts her rehabilitation and recovery."
"She's still very agitated and we don't know what she's thinking or what she is working through."
"I want to make sure I am going to provide the life for her that she has the least amount of barriers so that she can keep her autonomy and be an independent woman like she was before this tragic event."
Jerry Pinksen, nurse, Michael Garron Hospital, Toronto

Danielle Kane and her boyfriend, Jerry Pinksen, rushed into action during the Danforth shooting. A bullet struck and shattered Kane's T11 vertebrae, and it’s unclear if she’ll walk again, doctors say.  (GoFundMe)

The tragic event Mr. Pinksen referred to was the July 22 Danforth Avenue terrorist attack when a Muslim man, Faisal Hussain, 29, calmly armed himself with a handgun whose use he was comfortable with, and walked up and down Danforth Avenue and a few sidestreets, shooting at families and couples sitting in cafes and outdoor tables or just strolling along the street on a warm summer Sunday evening of relaxation. He aimed to kill and kill he did, lethally shooting 11-year-old Julianna Kozis eating ice cream seated at an outdoor venue with her family, and 18-year-old nursing student Reese Fallon.

Thirteen other innocent people were shot, some seriously. Nearby hospitals went into swift emergency treatment mode, performing quick-response surgeries. Danielle Kane who with her boyfriend Jerry Pinksen -- he a practising nurse at Michael Garron Hospital, she a student of nursing at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology -- were in a restaurant with friends when noisy panic ensued outside after a series of gunshots and word came to them that someone had been shot. Both reacted immediately, as health care professionals responding to a medical emergency.

Exiting the restaurant with the intention of immediately giving aid where it was needed they came across the armed assailant. Pinksen automatically ducked when he heard gunfire and simultaneously became aware that behind him someone had screamed. He found Danielle Kane slumped on the ground beside the restaurant, and the first aid he administered immediately was not to a stranger they had both determined to help, but to his girlfriend. The bullet that entered her chest on the left side passed through her abdomen ricocheting off her spine, exiting the right side of her chest.

She remained conscious until her surgery and since then has been on a ventilator, deliberately kept under sedation, unconscious. Doctors tending to her determined to ease her from the breathing machine and gradually reducing her sedation until she can breathe on her own and follow doctors' instructions before an evaluation of her condition and prospects can be completed. Rehabilitation is set to follow once she is well enough to lend her efforts to the enterprise of achieving normalization, whatever that will turn out to be.

Julianna Kozis, left, and Reese Fallon, right, were killed after a deadly rampage in Toronto's Greektown. (Toronto Police Service/Facebook)

The man who snarled his hatred at those he targeted, taking care to select only whites, none of ethnic origin in an area of central downtown Toronto called Greektown, in a city that is 42% immigrant stock, shot himself to death not far from where he shot Danielle Kane. His family issued a communique via a third person who wrote up a professionally polished message in their name to inform the public that their son was motivated by a severe mental health condition. This, a man long known to police who flag those they follow to reflect such issues and for him had none.

On the other hand, the kind of deep, lethal, abiding hatred that he manifested surely has its origin in a bleak, black pathology of hate reflecting social-cultural-religious lunacy. He had committed previous criminal acts over the years. His older brother had been on a condition of bail that meant he had to live with a surety. When police searched the living arrangements the killer's older brother and the surety shared, they discovered a large cache of weapons, and a huge arsenal of the uber-deadly drug carfentanil. The brother had overdosed a year ago on heroin cut with carfentanil resulting in a coma.

There are many questions -- unanswered with deliberation by authorities -- that courses through the minds of those who have familiarized themselves as much as can be possible, through reluctant news sources, respecting the intended use of the weapons and the killer drugs. Enough of the morbidly powerful carfentanil to cause death on a massive scale; enough deadly weapons to arm an Islamofascist jihadist army of haters. Canadian society's immigrant community of Islamists whose conviction and dedication to jihad against the infidel arrived with them and festers within their new country.

While they fulminate over Western social-religious degradation, plotting to elevate Islam, performing acts of terror, sacrificing themselves willingly to martyrdom to prove their dedication to Islam's sacred precepts of global domination, on this occasion three people who have dedicated themselves to aiding society through the nursing profession were victimized; one dead, another facing a lifetime of physical and psychological challenges, and the third overcoming adversity in life by providing health-and-emotional support.

And governments and policing agencies along with news sources soberly withhold inconvenient details in the interests of public order and prevention of social backlash -- content to advance theories of mental illness inflicting those whose violent attacks are clearly religion-inspired -- while encouraging the citizenry to focus on illegal, criminal gangs, drugs and guns, separate and aside from the religion of peace which has nothing whatever to do with all of that. Rampant gun possession by gang members in their enclaves beginning to resemble French banlieues, a matter of stricter regulation; not to worry, move on folks....

Durham Regional Police seized 53 kilograms of a suspicious substance and 33 firearms from a Pickering home on Sept. 20, 2017. Testing later determined 42 kilograms of the substance contained carfentanil. Durham Regional Police handout