A Grim Anniversary in Canada’s Fight Against Guns

Veteran police in Canada still remember the days when officers, stunned that a colleague had taken a gun off the street, would gather to have a look at the firearm.

“It would fly through the station,” said Paul Krawczyk, an inspector with the integrated guns and gangs task force of the Toronto Police Service, Canada’s largest metropolitan police force.

Seizing firearms is now a routine, and growing, part of the job for Canadian police, especially in Toronto. This week marked the grim anniversary of a mass shooting in 2018 in a bustling east Toronto neighborhood called Danforth. Two people — a teenager, Reese Fallon, 18, and a child, Julianna Kozis, 10 — were killed and 13 others were injured.

The gunman killed himself after the attack, which police said was carried out with a Smith & Wesson handgun that had been legally imported into Canada from the United States, then stolen from its owner.

Families of the victims filed a class-action lawsuit against Smith & Wesson in 2019, arguing that the gun manufacturer had been negligent in not installing “smart-gun” technology, like fingerprint recognition, that could have prevented the unauthorized use of their firearms. The lawsuit was certified by a judge in June after an appeal.

“We’re very relieved because we recognize the novel nature of the case,” said Ken Price, whose daughter, Samantha, was shot in the hip when she was 18.

“The gun manufacturers and the industry itself needs to be more concerned about how their guns are used,” Mr. Price told me.

Canada in recent years has tightened its gun laws. It banned most assault rifles in 2020, after the country’s deadliest mass shooting rampage in Nova Scotia. In 2022, the government introduced sweeping legislation to crack down on gun trafficking and put a freeze on the sale, purchase and transfer of handguns, of which about 1.1 million are registered in the country.

Further restrictions on certain firearm models have come into effect over the last eight months as the government rolled out its gun buyback program for assault-style rifles. The program is currently open to business owners of gun stores, and will be available to individual firearm owners later this year.

[Canadian reader call-out: Are you a gun owner? Do you operate a firearms business? Are you participating in the buyback? I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me at [email protected].]

While the government moves to expand firearm restrictions domestically, some officials are calling attention to gun smuggling across the border.

Aggregated data in a 2022 Canadian government report shows that about 32 percent of guns seized in crimes were smuggled from the United States, but the figures are much higher in urban parts of Ontario and Quebec.

For example, in Peel Region, an area covering the populous suburbs west of Toronto, 90 percent of the 205 guns seized in 2024 came from across the United States border.

Police forces have seen a steady rise in the number of illicit firearms traced to states with less stringent gun laws along the so-called Iron Pipeline along the Southern United States. In 2024, more than half of the illegal firearms seized in Quebec came from Ohio, Florida, Texas and Georgia, according to the provincial police.

In his ongoing trade dispute with Canada, President Trump has renewed his focus on border security, but blamed Canada for trafficking “massive” amounts of fentanyl south, a statement that has been disproved by American border data.

“My first thought was, what about all the guns coming north?” said Nando Iannicca, chair of the police service board in Peel Region, a civilian group governing police operations.

Mr. Trump’s bellicose tone on the border issue and tariffs, and his repeated threats of annexing Canada, has ruptured the relationship between the two countries.

“Canadian officials are perhaps understandably reluctant to provide these counterarguments in fear that they’re somehow going to rattle or anger President Trump,” said Scot Wortley, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto who is studying the use of guns among inner-city youth.

Toronto Police began tracking the origins of firearms in 2005, which came to be called the “summer of the gun” after a spate of shooting homicides.

“If we’re going to stop this crime, we have to stop these guns coming into the city,” said Inspector Krawczyk of the Toronto Police.

“We owe it to the citizens of Toronto,” he said.

Trans Canada

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