Most crime guns seized in Toronto smuggled from US: report

OTTAWA -- Most crime guns seized by police in Toronto, Canada's largest city, came from the United States, the National Post reported.

According to data from a Toronto police Twitter account, 84 of 116 firearms seized since January were prohibited, 20 restricted and 11 non-restricted, the newspaper reported last week, adding that prohibited weapons are not legal to buy, sell or possess in Canada, and are smuggled from the United States.

According to the report, Toronto Deputy Chief Myron Demkiw testified that 86 percent of crime guns were smuggled into Canada.

While not a comprehensive representation of every crime gun seized by Toronto police, these offered a glimpse into an aspect of criminality that rarely appears in publicly-available data, the report said.

Scott Blandford, assistant professor and program coordinator for policing and public safety at Wilfrid Laurier University, said the sheer length of the land border and unpatrolled coastlines make smuggling American firearms into Canada a nearly unstoppable phenomenon.

"It's not big shipments of hundreds of guns coming across - it's the one or two that are easy to conceal and slip across the border that then go for huge amounts of money," Blandford, who served for three decades as a cop, was quoted as saying in the report.

Last month, Canadian Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly temporarily banned handgun imports, a step toward a national freeze on the sale, transfer and ownership of handguns.