Internal RCMP Report Shows U.S. Not the Source of Most Canadian ‘Crime Guns’

Our neighbors to our north and south (and gun control activists here at home) love to blame the Unites States and the Second Amendment for violent crime in their countries, arguing that our right to keep and bear arms is fueling cross-border gun trafficking and arming criminals who would otherwise be unable to get ahold of guns. 

As investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson reported last fall, most guns traced in Mexico in recent years were actually legally purchased by the Mexican government or political subdivisions before being diverted to drug cartels. 

Now, an internal report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police obtained by the Canadian Press reveals that most of the firearms traced by the RCMP in 2023 and 2024 also came from domestic sources, not the United States. 

The centre reports that 71 per cent of those firearms traced in 2024 were domestically sourced long guns, 17 per cent were smuggled handguns, nine per cent were domestically sourced handguns and two per cent were smuggled long guns. A small number of firearms were not categorized as either long guns or handguns.

… The RCMP’s May 2024 report says that of the crime gun traces in 2023 where the firearm’s source could be identified, 86 per cent were deemed to have been domestically sourced and 14 per cent were smuggled.

The reports point out that the analyses, which include only traces by the RCMP centre, are not representative of the total number of gun traces in Ontario and Quebec — provinces that have their own tracing agencies.

It’s highly unlikely that reports from those provincial tracing agencies would wildly vary from the RCMP’s report, but I hope the Canadian Press will be able to get their hands on data from Ontario and Quebec in the near future so that can be confirmed. 

While these reports refute the idea that U.S. gun laws are to blame for violent crime in Canada, the country’s gun control lobby can now point to these figures as evidence of the need for the country’s sweeping gun bans put in place by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2020. 

The RCMP figures help paint a broader picture of crime guns in Canada that goes beyond high-profile shootings in urban centres, said Blake Brown, a historian at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax who has authored a history of gun control in Canada.

“I think it highlights the extent to which domestic firearms are often used in crimes across the country,” Brown said in an interview.

“You’re probably seeing a lot of incidents where these guns are being used in rural areas, particularly, and a lot of those guns … they’re not handguns flowing into Toronto across the border, they’re long guns that are owned by large swaths of people in rural parts of Canada.”

Brown is hardly an opponent of Canada’s tight restrictions on firearms. His history of Canadian gun control approvingly cites figures like Michael Moore and the discredited historian Michael Bellesiles, who received accolades for his 2000 book Arming America that claimed gun ownership in the Founding era was actually fairly uncommon, but later had his Bancroft Prize revoked after it was determined that much of his research “”violated basic norms of scholarship.”

For many anti-gunners, it doesn’t matter where traced firearms originally came from. Whether they were sold at retail in Toledo, Ohio or Toronto, Ontario, it’s their very existence that’s the problem. Still, the RCMP reports are yet more evidence that U.S. gun laws and gun owners aren’t to blame for violent crime in Canada and Mexico, despite the proclamations from some anti-gun activists. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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