OTTAWA — Think there’s a rural-urban divide on long-gun ownership?
Think again. Turns out Torontonians love their rifles and shotguns.
The Star has exclusively obtained a geographical breakdown of the federal firearms registry data that shows more than 287,000 “nonrestricted” weapons are registered in Canada’s biggest city.
They are rifles and shotguns, the firearms the federal Conservatives say are tools of trade for law-abiding hunters and farmers. A smattering, nearly 4,000, are labelled “combination” weapons, that have more than one barrel, generally “chambered for a different calibre cartridge,” the RCMP says.
These are not policy agency firearms or police service weapons. They are guns held by individuals that, since 2003, were required by law to be listed with the federal firearms registry, but will no longer have to be once Prime Minister Stephen Harper fulfils his promise to end the registration of long guns.
After Bill C-19 passes the Senate, as it is expected to do, all data on “nonrestricted” weapons will be destroyed — over the objections of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and others who say it is data vital for public and police safety.
The federal government will still track “restricted” and “prohibited” firearms.
Most of the “nonrestricted” firearms registered within the GTA are in the possession of individuals — 263,000 guns — while a smaller number (nearly 24,000) are held by businesses (not including police agencies) or museums.
There are tens of thousands of urbanites — more than 85,000 — legally licensed to possess a gun in Toronto, a number that may include some police officers who possess personal firearms.
Here’s what we know about them:
Nearly a quarter of licensees do not report having guns in their possession.
But the same number — more than 21,000 — have registered more than five weapons. In fact, 848 licensees report more than 20 guns in their possession, while 823 keep more than 30 firearms in their collection.
Overall, Toronto’s gun licence-holders range in age. Most are between 30 and 70 years old.
A small number are under 30 (10,000). But some 300 individuals over 90 years old, and three over 100 years old, hold gun licences.
Rifles and shotguns are the firearms of choice.
Most of those who went through the training and screening to get a licence did so to possess rifles and shotguns.
More than 53,000 licences to possess “nonrestricted” firearms are issued in the Greater Toronto metropolitan area — a census area of more than 5 million people.
Beyond rifles and shotguns, nearly 32,000 licences to possess the more dangerous “restricted” and “prohibited” categories of weapons have been issued to Torontonians.
Indeed, a surprising number of restricted and prohibited guns are legally registered — nearly 90,000 in the GTA. Again, these are not policy agency weapons. Those are separately accounted for.
Data on restricted and prohibited weapons will be retained by the government.
Still, the Coalition for Gun Control, which has enlisted the support of former Ontario attorney-general Michael Bryant, says the government’s move to destroy the data on thousands of “nonrestricted” guns is “bizarre and reckless” since it is so valuable to police and prosecutors.
“It’s like throwing a bomb into a crime lab because they didn’t want any evidence left there,” said Bryant told the Star.
He said the numbers also show “this isn’t a rural-urban issue. This is quite simply safety, and suicide prevention.”
“These numbers support the idea that there are some people, sure, who are weekend hunters during the hunting season, but there are also some people who are clearly hoarding a significant collection of guns, and those guns are always at risk since about half the guns that show up at crime scenes are stolen from legal gun owners,” said Bryant.
He dismissed suggestions that Conservatives may have political support for Bill C-19 in GTA ridings given the level of long gun ownership.
“In the GTA I can’t believe gun rights is an issue that helps the Conservatives. My experience and my sense is that most people in Toronto support gun control because they know that it’s one of the reasons our city is so much safer than Chicago or Washington D.C., where they have a lot more guns and a lot more gun crime.”
The data for Toronto show more than 9,000 firearms — mostly “nonrestricted” rifles and shotguns — are in police custody. These are guns that are seized, surrendered, found or turned over for safekeeping, for example. Only 3,381 of these are matched with a registered firearm.
Perhaps because of such a proliferation of guns — legal and illegal — in Toronto, area police forces have become big fans of reporting to, and accessing the Canadian Firearms Registry Online.
In the last five years, Toronto police services reported more than 18,000 incidents involving recovered, lost, seized or stolen weapons — via CPIC (the Canadian Police Information Centre database) — to the RCMP-run firearms registry “to ensure that lost or stolen firearms cannot be reregistered, as well as provide a central database to support police services with firearm-related investigations,” according to the RCMP.
And police officers in the GTA are one of the heaviest users of the database, making nearly one-quarter of all daily queries by Canadian police agencies in 2011.
Toronto officers on average queried the registry more than 4,200 times a day. New quarterly numbers show overall Canadian police submit a daily average of 17,762 queries a day, up from an annual number posted this week of 14,000 queries for 2010.
Critics of the registry and Conservative government members insist that those queries are meaningless. They argue any cop who runs a casual license plate check through CPIC automatically triggers a query to the firearms registry and throws the stats out of whack.
The RCMP says not so.
It acknowledges two law enforcement agencies have “modified their CPIC interface to automatically check the online firearms registry,” but most queries are deliberate searches of the database — most commonly individual names and addresses — by on-scene law enforcement officers in order “to be forewarned of the risk of firearms being present in a vehicle, residence or at a crime scene prior to making an approach. They are also investigative in nature, providing police investigators real-time information.”
One Toronto area officer, who spoke only on background, countered the registry critics, saying “you can’t write off the numbers of queries to a mechanical thing.”
The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, in testimony before the Commons committee on C-19, opposed the dismantling of the long gun registry.
Gatineau Chief Mario Harel testified that while there are “auto-queries,” those are “an endorsement of the fact that law enforcement views this information as a valuable tool . . . a bit of information which, when combined with other information, assists in assessing a situation an officer may face.”
Harel warned the end of the long-gun registry will mean there will be “no record-keeping during transfers of long guns.” He said between 2006 and 2009, 1.85 million long guns changed hands. He added it would inhibit the enforcement of weapons prohibition orders; add significant costs to investigations, which will be downloaded to police services and lead to crucial delays in gaining investigative information.
What’s what:
“Restricted” guns (of which there are 62,818 registered in Toronto) include: handguns that are not prohibited; semi-automatic, centre-fire rifles and shotguns with a barrel shorter than 470 mm; rifles and shotguns that can be fired when their overall length has been reduced by folding, telescoping or other means to less than 660 mm; and firearms restricted by Criminal Code Regulations.
“Prohibited” guns (of which there are 26,315 registered in Toronto) include: handguns with a barrel length of 105 mm or less, and handguns that discharge .25- or .32-calibre ammunition, except for a few specific ones used in International Shooting Union competitions; rifles and shotguns that have been altered by sawing or other means so that their barrel length is less than 457 mm or their overall length is less than 660 mm; full automatics; converted automatics, namely full automatics that have been altered so that they fire only one projectile when the trigger is squeezed; and firearms prohibited by Criminal Code Regulations.
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