https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/world/americas/canada-gun-violence-us.html

As U.S. Guns Pour Into Canada, the Bodies Pile Up

The proliferation of illegal firearms from the United States has fueled a spike in gun violence in Canada, where most guns used in crimes are smuggled across the border.

Guns waving in the air, the partygoers danced inside a recording studio on a fashionable city block, near a bar with craft cocktails like “Espresso Yourself” and a boutique hotel with what a Michelin Guide called a “bohemian-baroque aesthetic.”

Then, just after midnight, three rival gang members descended on the alley behind the studio and began firing. The partygoers cracked a door and shot back wildly. Nearly 100 bullets tore into the night, many striking a nearby supermarket and homes.

It was a miracle no one was killed or injured, the police said. When the dust settled, officers recovered 16 guns tossed into trash bins, dumped in the alleyway and shoved under a couch — each one smuggled across the southern border, the police said.

Canada’s border with the United States, that is.

“Within two days, we knew every single firearm that we’d seized that night was from the United States — which wasn’t surprising,” said Inspector Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police Service, adding that the guns had been trafficked north from Arizona, Oregon, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

American firearms are spilling increasingly into a country where gun control is far stricter than in the United States, according to government data and the authorities. Smugglers are hiding them inside commercial and personal vehicles, but are also loading them on drones, concealing them in boats or stashing them in a dead drop in a library straddling the border. Many guns then fetch up to eight times their original price on Canada’s black market.

The proliferation of illegal guns from the United States has fueled bloodshed in Canadian cities and even in remote northern communities. It has brought the kind of random gun violence rarely seen before, like the shootout last year at the studio in Toronto’s hip Queen Street West neighborhood.

Homicides have spiked in Canada in the past decade, most of them from guns.

Gang-related shootings have killed at least three innocent bystanders this year in the Toronto area, including an 8-year-old boy in his own bedroom.

Most guns used in crimes in Canada enter illegally across the border.

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 91 percent of handguns recovered from crimes in 2024 came in illegally from the United States, according to the provincial government. In Toronto, the country’s biggest city, 88 percent of all firearms recovered from crimes in 2024 were smuggled across the border, up from 51 percent in 2014, according to the Toronto police. The actual figures are almost certainly higher because many recovered guns have been tampered with to make them untraceable, the police said.

More and more illegal guns from the United States have been confiscated during stings in the past five years, said Det. Superintendent Lee Fulford of the Ontario Provincial Police.

“In the past, we’d seize one or two guns in a search warrant,” he said. “Now we’re up to dozens or even more.”

Last year, Mr. Fulford led an undercover investigation that resulted in the seizure of 274 handguns and assault-style rifles — a record in Ontario — that had been smuggled into Canada or were in transit. The police arrested 16 traffickers based in the Toronto area who resold the firearms “within days or even hours” after they arrived in Canada, he said.

The price of trafficked guns has risen sharply in recent years, Mr. Fulford said. Today, a handgun bought in Florida for $500 can fetch up to $4,300 in southern Ontario, he said.

The Canadian authorities have also been confiscating more firearms at the border with the United States: 827 in 2024, up from 459 in 2020, according to the Canada Border Services Agency.

For cities like Toronto, the trafficking has led to a big shift in policing and culture.

Hank Idsinga, who led the Toronto Police’s homicide squad until his retirement last year after more than three decades on the force, said an illegal gun possession arrest was extremely rare early in his career.

“Literally, police officers would drive out to see the gun because it was so unusual,” Mr. Idsinga said.

Back then, only established organized crime groups had access to guns and guarded them tightly, said Marcell Wilson, 47, who was involved in organized crime in his youth before changing course to establish an organization against guns and gangs called One by One.

“Now there is a pipeline that gives street-level gangs or neighborhood groups access to almost anything they want,” Mr. Wilson said.

In the past, guns were used to protect rackets, and shootings were a measure of “last resort,” he said, whereas today, “the slightest disrespect can lead to a 30-man shootout.”

“Civilians are getting killed and struck, which was not only unseen and unheard-of, it was a big no-no,” Mr. Wilson said.

Holly Roy, who works for an Indigenous organization focused on preventing violence, said guns never worried her during her early years in Toronto, where she moved in 2007 from her hometown in northern Ontario when her elder son was a toddler.

But they eventually became inescapable.

Her elder son, she said, was shot during a robbery six years ago when he was 16 but survived. Then a 15-year-old boy was shot dead last year in a seemingly targeted killing in a shopping plaza near their home in northern Toronto. Early last summer, Ms. Roy and her three children heard gunfire just outside their ground-floor apartment.

She worried especially about her youngest, JahVai, 8, growing up in an environment that glorified gang life and material goods. JahVai had appeared in an anti-bullying video for One by One after his brother’s shooting, but he liked expensive sneakers and imitated the way teenagers talked, Ms. Roy said.

It was past midnight on Aug. 16, Ms. Roy recalled, in the bedroom she shared with JahVai — the one directly facing the courtyard.

The mother and son heard shots. Both sat up in bed, glass hitting her face, terror contorting his, in the instant before yet another shot.

“There was brain matter on my shirt,” the mother said. “I just held him.”

The stray bullets had come from a group firing outside the building, the police said, and also struck two other apartments without causing injury. Three suspects — all of them minors at the time of the shooting — have been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the death of JahVai.

One of the suspects, a 16-year-old, was arrested with a loaded firearm modified to fire automatically. The Toronto police have yet to release information about the origin of the guns used in the shootout.

Demand for firearms in Canada is driving the smuggling from the United States, the authorities said, especially for handguns, which are used in most crimes. In 2023, Canada further tightened control over handguns, making them virtually impossible to buy or transfer legally.

“It’s so different than the U.S.,” said Clayton Campbell, the president of the Toronto police union.

In Hamilton, a city southwest of Toronto near the border, the police began noticing a spike in gang-related shootings starting in 2023.

“Before that, it was very rare to have a shooting in Hamilton,” said Det. Mario Rizzo, a veteran of the Hamilton Police Service. “But then it was increasing to the point where it was like another, another, and you become desensitized.”

Last year, the Hamilton police broke up a network of 24 traffickers and seized 14 firearms. With accomplices in the United States, they smuggled guns inside boxes aboard tractor-trailers every few weeks, Mr. Rizzo said.

The arrests, though, have hardly stopped Hamilton’s violence. This year, in separate incidents, two women in their 20s were killed at busy bus stops after they were caught in what appeared to be gang-related shootings, according to the police. The authorities have yet to recover the guns used in the shootings.

Across Canada, the homicide rate increased 33 percent from 2013 to 2023, largely because of firearm killings, which jumped 89 percent, according to government data. While firearms and stabbings alternated as the leading cause of homicides in the past, firearms have been the primary method of killing in Canada every year since 2016.

Still, Canadian cities remain far safer than their American counterparts. In 2024, there were 85 homicides in Toronto, compared with 580 in Chicago, with a similar population. In 2023, Americans were nearly eight times as likely to be killed in a gun homicide as Canadians.

But the rapid proliferation of guns has police officials worried.

The shootout at the studio gave an unusual glimpse into the problem. Security footage showed the partygoers admiring and brandishing their guns. They also posted video of themselves on social media, the police said, their faces and guns exposed.

A rival gang “came to announce their displeasure using firearms,” said Inspector Krawczyk, who until recently commanded the Toronto police’s gun and gang task force.

Unbeknown to the gangs, two undercover police officers in an unmarked car were parked behind the studio. They had tracked a partygoer through his court-ordered ankle monitor to the studio, where he was celebrating his birthday, instead of staying at home.

The officers, whose car was riddled with bullets, helped arrest 23 people. They recovered the 16 guns smuggled in from the United States, some altered to fire automatically.

“That’s how easily accessible these guns are,” Inspector Krawczyk said. “They go to a birthday party and they bring them there. The only reason we were able to get 16 of them that night is because we were there.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5812696&forum_id=2Elisa#49526932)

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5812696&forum_id=2Elisa#49526940)