In 2020, for most victims of firearm-related violent crime in urban areas (63%) and in most CMAs, the incident involved handguns (Table 8). Handguns were the most common firearms in Toronto (86% of firearm-related violent crime), Windsor (80%), Ottawa (78%) and Barrie (78%). The CMAs with the highest rates of handgun crime were Windsor, Brantford, Hamilton, Toronto and Winnipeg (Table 9). The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of incidents of gun violence in the United States, defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot even if no one was killed (again, without the shooters). According to this definition, 513 people died in these incidents in 2020. Most serious weapon present: the heaviest weapon present during the commission of a violent crime and deemed relevant by police, whether or not the weapon was used and whether or not a victim was involved. This variable includes incidents where a firearm was used against a victim who caused injury, was used against a victim without causing injury (e.g., as a threat), or was present during the crime, but was not used in any way. This section examines the characteristics of firearm-related violent crime and examines crime types, with a particular focus on firearm-related homicides (Text box 4). It also looks at what types of firearms are present and how they differ in urban and rural areas. A box on non-violent firearms offences is also available (Box 5). In light of these data gaps, the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics (CCJCS) conducted a feasibility study at Statistics Canada in consultation with key stakeholders and identified information that could be collected by police services through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey. As a result, starting in 2021, the CCJCSS has made a number of revisions to the UCR Program.
It should be noted that it may take a few years before these changes are fully implemented by police services to allow for this information to be reported to the UCR. However, deaths from “mass shootings” that attract international attention are harder to track. As with violent crime in general, rates of firearm-related violent crime in 2020 were highest in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the territories (Table 1). The Northwest Territories and Nunavut had the highest rates, but rates in the territories can vary significantly from year to year due to low numbers and low population. The high rates of firearm-related violent crime in Saskatchewan and Manitoba were mainly due to high rates of robbery and serious robbery where a firearm was present. Among the provinces, Saskatchewan had the second highest combined rate of firearm-related homicides and attempted murders in 2020 (second only to Nova Scotia, where the high rate was due to the April 2020 mass shooting). In Canada, there is no national data on the types of firearms involved in injuries, but research suggests that more people are injured by long guns than by handguns. For example, the 1993-94 Alberta study found that the majority of gun visits to emergency rooms and acute hospitalizations were due to long-gun injuries (Injury Prevention Centre Edmonton, 1996). Conversely, in the United States, handguns are more often implicated in firearm injuries than other types of firearms (Sadowski & Muñoz, 1996: 1763; Vassar and Kizer, 1996).
Canada owes the success of its statistical system to a long-standing partnership between Statistics Canada, the citizens of Canada, its businesses, governments and other institutions. Without their continued cooperation and goodwill, it would be impossible to produce accurate and up-to-date statistical information. Although the accused was most often a stranger in incidents of firearm-related violent crime, this was less common in rural areas. Notably, one in four women who were the victim of a violent crime committed with a firearm in 2020 was stalked by a current or former spouse or other intimate partner, compared with 2% of men. Statistics Canada continues to work with police services across the country to improve data on firearm-related violent crime. A relevant improvement is the development of a standard classification of data on street crime and gang activity. In 2020, data from police services covering 93% of the Canadian population revealed that 6% of victims of firearm-related violent crime were involved in a criminal organization or gang incident. In addition to information on criminal weapons, there are a number of other gaps in knowledge about the nature of gun violence in Canada. The extent to which organized crime is involved in gun violence is currently unclear. Trends in ethnicity, Aboriginal identity (excluding murder data) and socio-economic characteristics of victims and accused of firearm-related violence are also unknown. Although it is difficult to calculate the number of weapons in private hands worldwide, figures from the Small Arms Survey – a leading research project in Switzerland – estimate that there were 390 million weapons in circulation in 2018. The Uniform Crime Reporting Survey uses four categories to collect information on the heaviest weapon present in the commission of a crime, whether used or not.
Handguns include any firearm designed to be held and fired with one hand, including semi-automatic pistols. Rifles and shotguns make up most long-barrelled firearms. Sawed-off shotguns or shotguns and all fully automatic firearms are listed separately in this section and marked as “other firearms”. In addition, information is also collected on firearm-like weapons, such as pellet guns or flares, and firearms of unknown type. The perpetrator of firearm-related violent crime was most often a stranger to the victim (55% of male victims and 41% of female victims) (Table 13; Figure 13). However, this was due to the nature of firearm-related violent crime in urban areas. Instead, in the rural South, the perpetrator was a stranger to 31 per cent of male victims and 22 per cent of women; In the rural North, the perpetrator`s stranger was even rarer (23% and 14% respectively). This could be related to the fact that many communities in the rural north are relatively small and foreigners less so. Under this definition, in multi-victim incidents, each victim is counted as a person as a separate “firearm-related crime.” Only 24 percent of Republicans agreed with the same statement, as did 45 percent of independent voters.
Although the country does not have a uniform definition of “mass shootings,” the FBI has been tracking “active shooting incidents” for more than a decade, in which “a person actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated area.” Homicide, other fatal offences and attempted murder (combined) accounted for more than one-quarter (27%) of firearm-related crimes committed as confirmed or suspected in support of organized crime or gang activity. Robbery (22%) and intentional discharge of a firearm (21%) were the second most common offences. For information on gang-related homicides, see Firearm-related homicides. The largest increases between the two six-year periods examined in this study were observed in Saskatchewan (+93%), the Northwest Territories (+87%) and Manitoba (+44%). These jurisdictions also had higher average rates of firearm-related crime between 2015 and 2020 than elsewhere, as did Nunavut (Figure 4).