10mo ago

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has lost 205 firearms since 2020, including machine-guns

www.ctvnews.ca

The data, which was obtained through an access to information request, also shows that nearly a dozen RCMP firearms have gone missing so far this year.

In total, 122 handguns, 55 shotguns, 23 rifles, three submachine-guns and two machine-guns have been reported lost by RCMP detachments across the country since 2020. Canadians are largely prohibited from using or acquiring machine-guns and submachine-guns, which are fully automatic and capable of rapid fire.

Nearly half of the guns were lost in 2021, when a staggering 99 RCMP firearms were reported missing, including three fully automatic weapons. There were also 25 lost firearms in 2020, 44 in 2022, 26 in 2023 and 11 in the first seven months of 2024.

13 comments

Why do the police need machine guns?
- North Hollywood shoot out mostly.
  The Americans decided they needed them and of course we were not far behind for reasons.
  
  That was a singular, isolated event, probably heavily influenced by the movie Heat. We've never had another robbery like that since then.
- Those G20 protesters could get out of hand and need gentle mowing.
  Entrapment and kettling can only get a riot brigade so far.
Classic King Missile - Take Stuff From Work.
ACAB
RCMP - We're responsible cops.
loses 205 firearms in 4 years
RCMP - Whelp, accidents happen.
Did they ever find that entire truck full of guns that went missing during the convoi?
Edit : answered my own question
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/mobile/13-guns-still-missing-from-trailer-stolen-in-peterborough-ont-1.5785383
The article isn't clear on what is categorized as "lost" in this context. Are these all "we know for sure they were stolen" or are some of them "we couldn't find them when we did inventory, but they might just have ended up in an incorrectly-labeled box"? While neither of those is good, one is clearly worse than the other.
- In total, 122 handguns, 55 shotguns, 23 rifles, three submachine-guns and two machine-guns have been reported lost by RCMP detachments across the country since 2020.
  The data was obtained and shared exclusively with CTVNews.ca by Matt Malone, a government secrecy researcher and scholar with the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont. Malone is also the founder of Open by Default, a digital database that contains more than 5.2 million pages of documents released through Canada's access to information system.
  In its response to Malone, the RCMP's access to information office said it "cannot determine specifically if a firearm was lost by a service member."
  Source
  
  In other words, the article specifically says that they don't know (or at least, the RCMP won't say) what led to most of these firearms being reported as lost (we have external invormation in a few cases, like the trailer theft mentioned by another commenter, but not for most). There isn't even enough information there for us to be able to tell whether all detachments use the same criteria in deciding whether a firearm qualifies as lost.

13 comments