Gun Control

Gun licence applications are on the rise in the Greater Toronto Area. Between 2016 and 2025, the number of applicants for possession and acquisition licences, or PALs—the permits that allow Canadians to buy firearms—have increased by nearly 50 per cent. In some parts of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, like the eastern suburb of Peel, they’ve more than doubled. And southern Ontario isn’t the only place where this is happening. The number of PAL licence holders across Canada is quickly nearing 2.5 million, the highest count on record.

We’re gonna need em.

About halfway into a chilling New York Times feature detailing how the “right to kill is growing” in the United States, investigative reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike McIntire drops a popular myth. The Constitution’s text, he contends, “says nothing explicitly about an individual right to have a gun for everyday self-defense. Locating that right in the Constitution became the grand project of the modern gun lobby.”

The very first rule of gun safety is “treat every gun as if it’s loaded.” The second rule of gun safety is “don’t point your gun at anything you’re not willing to kill.”

RSO clocked them so fast. pic.twitter.com/iiYix8avpw

— Doc Strangelove (@DocStrangelove2) August 6, 2026

Anti-hunting groups don’t make a lot of sense to me. I get people wanting harvested animals killed humanely and not left to rot in the woods. I want that, for crying out loud, and that’s true of every hunter I know.

Yet hunters are also conservationists. Not only do they help thin herds so there’s less competition for limited resources among animals like deer, but hunting license fees help fund government efforts to protect these animals.

The Supreme Court of Canada is preparing to hear four connected appeals concerning the federal Order in Council that prohibited more than 1,500 firearm models beginning May 1, 2020.

CSSA has applied for leave to intervene.

That does not mean the Supreme Court has granted CSSA a place in the case.

A jury in Simcoe will decide whether Toronto police officers were negligent when they shot and killed Norfolk County gunsmith Rodger Kotanko at his workshop west of Port Dover in 2021.

Officers from the Toronto Police Service’s guns and gangs task force came to Norfolk with a search warrant after two guns reportedly registered to the veteran gunsmith’s business were seized in criminal investigations.

In the wake of Kotanko’s death, his family sued Toronto police for $23 million, alleging “reckless” decision-making and poor planning needlessly put the 70-year-old in harm’s way.

h/t Mauser

A Montreal police officer is dead. A civilian is dead. Another officer was seriously injured. The suspect is dead. That’s the starting point, and it’s grave enough without politicians pretending the investigation is already finished.

Canadian news outlets reported that Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, was killed after police responded to reports of a shooter near a Hilton hotel in Côte-des-Neiges.

The US supreme court will consider whether bans on semi-automatic rifles, often called assault weapons, violate the second amendment.

The justices said on Tuesday they will hear appeals challenging bans on the AR-15 and similar semi-automatic firearms in Connecticut and the Chicago area.

Similar laws are in place in about a dozen states, covering major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC. Congress allowed a national assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, but Democrats have supported renewing it in response to a series of mass shootings. States have also continued to pass their own laws, including recent measures in Virginia and Rhode Island.

One good thing about the Wolford decision is that it’s giving us plenty to write about. Hemani gave us a bit, too, but since most of the media is pro-marijuana, it wasn’t quite as much as we might have liked. Wolford, though, has gotten all the anti-gunners wound up. When they get wound up, they start talking stupid, such as pretending that the vampire rule wasn’t a radical departure from the status quo.

Another US-to-Canada firearms trafficking case shows where the real public safety threat lives: smugglers, straw purchasers, border pipelines, and organized crime.

The latest US-to-Canada gun trafficking case does not point to hunters, sport shooters, collectors, farmers, or licenced firearms owners: the focal point of Ottawa’s firearms confiscation schemes.