To hear the Prime Minister talk about his gun control strategy, it’s been a stunning success. Many police chiefs’ responses thoroughly denounce this as, at best, self-serving spin:
As police unions pillory federal gun bans for doing nothing to address skyrocketing gun crime, an Ontario police department revealed this week that virtually all its crime guns are now illegal imports from the United States.
“Approximately 90 per cent of (the) firearms that we seize are directly traced back to the U.S. And I can say in reality the remaining 10 per cent are likely also from the U.S.,” Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah said at a Monday press conference. The 10 per cent referred to guns that have been modified or had their serial numbers removed, making them harder to trace.
Duraiappah was announcing the results of Project Sledgehammer, the breakup of a gun smuggling ring that included the seizure of a shipment of so-called “giggle switches” — black market devices that can turn a regular handgun into an automatic machine pistol.
But during the press conference, police revealed that both gun crime — and the number of illegal guns in the community — is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.
The Peel Regional Police cover an area immediately to the west of Toronto that includes Mississauga and Brampton. Duraiappah said that only 10 years ago, if a criminal in the Peel Region wanted an illegal gun, “it was doable, but it required a lot of work.”
Now, Peel Police are seizing an illegal gun about once every 30 hours — an 87 per cent increase over the year prior. Illegal guns are now so ubiquitous that they often show up in unrelated investigations, such as an impaired driver having one in his glove compartment.
“The availability of firearms has just saturated the community,” said Duraiappah.
This has all occurred in tandem with a nationwide spike in gun crime, including fatal shootings.
Earlier this year, Statistics Canada published 2022 data showing that “firearm-related violent crime” was at the highest rate recorded since they started tracking it in 2009.
