The Royal Canadian Mounted Police lost a total of 205 firearms since 2020, including submachine guns and machine guns, according to data obtained through an access-to-information request.
Over the past four years, the RCMP have reported losing 122 handguns, 55 shotguns, 23 rifles, three submachine-guns and two machine-guns, with nearly a dozen firearms having already been lost this year.
Machine-guns and sub-machine guns, which are fully automatic weapons, are almost entirely prohibited from being privately owned by Canadians.
The bulk of the lost guns went missing in 2021, a year when the RCMP reported an astonishing 99 missing firearms, including three fully automatic weapons.
In 2020, the police agency lost 25 firearms, 44 in 2022 and 26 last year.
It remains unknown if any of the lost firearms have been recovered, or if any charges or disciplinary measures occurred as result of their disappearance.
According to Statistics Canada, “in 2022, police services in Canada reported about 14,000 firearm-related violent crimes.”
“This rate is 8.9% higher than that recorded in the previous year and represents a peak since collection of comparable data began in 2009. The rate of firearm-related homicide (0.88 incidents per 100,000) was also the highest rate recorded since 1991,” it said.
The data on missing firearms was obtained by researcher and scholar Matt Malone and shared with CTV News.
Malone works with the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont. and is also the founder of digital database Open by Default, which is home to over 5.2 million government documents released through Canada’s access to information system.
The RCMP did not respond to True North’s request for comment.
However, in its response to Malone’s access-to-information request, Canada’s federal police force said it “cannot determine specifically if a firearm was lost by a service member.”
A previous access-to-information request filed by Open by Default revealed that an additional 601 firearms were reported lost by the RCMP between 2000 and 2019, which included 15 machine-guns and submachine-guns.
The RCMP employs over 30,000 people across the country, including more than 19,000 police officers.