OTTAWA/TORONTO, July 27 (Reuters) – A Texas man bought dozens of guns from licensed dealers in the state before illegally reselling at least 16, U.S. officials said. Twelve were traced for crimes committed in America. The other four were wanted for crimes in Canada.
The case of the 31-year-old man, who was indicted last month on charges that could land him in prison for years, illustrates the leading role the Lone Star State now plays in smuggling weapons used for violence into Canada, and how tracking firearms can help fight this trade.
Canadian police chiefs say such cases also show the limits of their government’s domestic policies to combat gun violence, such as a freeze on handgun purchases when it has the largest civilian gun market in the world at your doorstep.
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“We really feel that restricting legal gun ownership doesn’t meaningfully address the real problem, which is illegal guns coming from the United States,” said Evan Bray, police chief in Regina, Saskatchewan’s provincial capital.
Canada’s gun homicide rate in 2020 was one-eighth that of the United States, where gun purchase rules are looser, but higher than rates in many other wealthy countries and rising, according to Statistics Canada data.
Exclusive data obtained by Reuters for Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, shows that when guns used in crimes were traced in 2021, they were overwhelmingly — 85 percent of the time — found to have come from the United States states.
Additionally, 70% of all traced guns used in crimes in Ontario come from the United States, with the U.S. share rising to 73% so far this year, according to data from the police’s Firearms Analysis and Tracking (FATE) program in Ontario.
Ontario is the only province with a dedicated tracking program that seeks to identify the source of all guns used in crimes, said Scott Ferguson, head of FATE. The rest of Canada traced only 6%-10% of guns used in crimes, according to 2019 data from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), a federal agency.
On Monday, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police called on the federal government to make tracking crime weapons mandatory across Canada.
“I’m confident we’ll take steps in that direction,” said Bray, who co-chairs the association’s special firearms committee.
Alexander Cohen, director of communications for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, said the government is aware of the importance of gun tracking. “We know more need to be tracked, which is why the 2021 budget is investing C$15 million ($11.7 million) to improve the RCMP’s gun tracking capacity,” he added.
Still, the method has its limitations: Ontario data show police were unable to trace nearly half the firearms they tried to trace last year, for reasons including obliterated serial numbers and the lack of a national long gun registry.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government introduced new legislation in May to combat gun violence, including a freeze on handgun purchases and a ban on the sale of high-volume magazines. But mandatory tracking is not part of it. Read more
The announcement came after mass shootings south of the border in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York. The toll of gun violence was felt closer to home this week when a gunman shot four people in British Columbia, killing two. Read more
Mendicino told Reuters the government was mindful of Canada’s specific circumstances with the May measures, citing “alarming statistics about the increase in gun violence,” specifically the rising rate of homicides by firearms.
“We came to the conclusion that a national gun freeze would be the fastest and most effective way to reverse this trend,” Mendicino said.
TEXAS CONNECTION ‘SHOCKING’
Canada’s gun homicide rate is on the rise: 2020 and 2017 are tied for the highest since at least 1997, according to Statistics Canada. In 2020, gun homicides accounted for nearly 40 percent of the nation’s 743 homicides, while more than 60 percent of violent gun crimes in urban areas involved handguns.
Canada’s firearm homicide rate in 2020 was 5.6 times higher than Australia’s, according to each country’s government statistics. Canada’s rate is also five times higher than in Germany in 2010 and 2.5 times higher than in the Netherlands, according to a 2016 comparative study published in the American Journal of Medicine.
Ferguson’s team at FATE takes serial numbers and runs them into databases in Canada and, if nothing turns up, in the United States.
Texas became the largest U.S. source of crime weapons traced to Ontario, with 150 firearms counted last year — five times the 30 identified in 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and explosives (ATF) quoted from FATE numbers. Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Oklahoma round out the top five.
The southern US state has some of the laxest gun laws in America, according to the ATF’s Texas office in Dallas.
Tracking by Canadian authorities provides key intelligence to the ATF, which can then investigate and prosecute the purchasers of firearms that are subsequently sold illegally or smuggled, said Chris Taylor, ATF attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa.
The agency opens about 120 investigations a year in the United States based on guns traced to crimes in Canada, with more than 90 per cent originating in Ontario, Taylor said. The number of cases is growing, with ATF opening more than 180 probes since October thanks to Canadian tracking, he added.
Jeff Boshek, ATF special agent in charge of the Dallas field division, said he and his colleagues were amazed when tracking data began to show that Canada was a growing destination for guns from Texas.
Boshek said about 30 percent of all guns purchased in Texas and then traced to crimes committed abroad are linked to Canada, “which is shocking to me,” because just a few years ago 100 percent were linked to crimes in Mexico. Boshek said the Dallas ATF office is currently investigating many leads flagged by Canada.
When Texas smugglers can double their money for a gun sold in Mexico, they make 10 times the price of the gun in Canada, the agent added.
GLOCK FOR C$8000
Gun smuggling can be lucrative: A typical Glock pistol trafficked from the U.S. is worth between C$6,000 ($4,603) and C$8,000 in the Toronto area, Ferguson said, about 10 times its $500 purchase price south of the border.
It’s also busy: The number of firearms seized by Canada at the border more than doubled last year to 1,110 from 495 in 2020 — the highest total since at least 2016, according to numbers provided to Reuters from Canada Border Services Agency.
This year is on track to be nearly as high, with 523 firearms confiscated as of the first week of June.
Gun violence in Toronto, Canada’s most populous city, hit a 15-year high in 2019 with 492 incidents involving firearms, according to police data. That number dropped over the next two years, but is on track to rise again in 2022.
In Winnipeg, which had the highest firearm homicide rate of any major Canadian city in 2020 – 1.32 per 100,000 – police have a firearms investigation and analysis unit to track weapons used in crimes .
They can use shell casings to trace a gun from a shooting in Winnipeg to crimes elsewhere, according to Winnipeg Police Inspector Elton Hall, who called the technique a “game changer.”
“UNWINNING FIGHT”
But tracking is far from foolproof: Last year, 1,173 guns — about 47% of all those Ontario tried to track — couldn’t be traced at all, up from about 28.5% in 2018. In addition to Canada’s lack of a registry for long guns, 3D-printed guns, and those with serial numbers that are too damaged to be traced.
Toronto Police Detective Sergeant Andrew Stainwall, who has been investigating gun crime in Toronto for more than 15 years, sees efforts to combat gun smuggling as “an unwinnable battle.”
“We don’t have the resources to seize every gun in this country that has entered illegally,” he said.
Smugglers are resourceful: In May, a gun-carrying drone believed to be from the United States was caught in a tree in the backyard of an apartment building in Port Lambton, Ontario, just across the St. Clair River from Michigan.
“A drone, a gas tank, an unsuspecting mule … these guys will find a way to get these weapons across the border,” Steinwall added. “The demand is here.”
($1 = 1.2874 Canadian dollars)
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Reporting by Steve Scherer in Ottawa and Anna Meller Paperny in Toronto; Editing by Danny Thomas and Pravin Char
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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