"AR-15s don't kill people; people kill people" - Ottawa Citizen (blog)

By now, you've probably read more than you'd like to about the rifle used to slaughter 20 first graders in Newtown, Connecticut, and its legal status in the United States.

So far, though, I haven't seen much on the prevalance of the rifle in Canada. Jennifer Ditchburn of Canadian Press has a good piece today on the Ruger Mini-14 (used in the 1989 Polytechnique massacre of 14 young women in Montreal) and the Beretta CX4 Storm (infamous from the 2006 Dawson College shooting).

The AR-15 is a civilianized version of the M-16, the standard rifle used by the U.S. military. In Canada, only the semi-automatic version may be legally purchased by qualified buyers. The description of it as an "assault rifle" is subjective not entirely accurate. It is not legal for hunting and  clearly has military heritage, but the AR-15 is functionally different than the military-issue M-16.

Semi-automatic means a round is fired with each pull of the trigger and another round is automatically moved into the chamber. It cannot fire a continuous stream of bullets like a fully-automatic rifle, and it is not capable of burst modes of three shots with one trigger pull. There are enormous numbers of semi-automatic rifles in Canada that are not restricted and, since the Conservative government scrapped the long-gun registry, no longer have to be registered.

We don't have any recent data on the number of AR-15s in Canada but records I obtained through an Access to Information request to the RCMP in 2007 give a rough idea of the rifle's popularity.

The data from the Canadian Firearms Centre showed 3,873 AR-15s and variants had been legally registered to businesses or individuals (that is, not military or the police).

In the downtown Ottawa area defined by the K1 postal code zone, where I live, the data show that there are 36 AR-15s registered to individuals or businesses.  By comparison, there are 124 public and Catholic schools in the same area.

There are some important considerations in comparing Canada's arsenal of AR-15 to those in the U.S.

Reports from Newtown suggest the shooter used magazines of 30 rounds. That means he could have fired 30 times without stopping to reload. In Canada, since Polytechnique, these high-capacity magazines have been illegal to sell or purchase. Only five round magazines can be used with the restricted-class AR-15.

Also, in Canada, it is illegal to use the AR-15 anywhere but on a gun range. Of course, that's a meaningless restriction for anyone who has access to the weapon and is intent on doing harm with it — like Kimveer Gill, who took his entirely-legal Beretta Storm to Dawson College and killed 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa and wounded many others.

Arguably, the Dawson College shooting could have been much worse without the magazine capacity restriction put in place by the Mulroney government, or if Gill had used a more powerful rifle.

Also, as I noted last year at the time of the Aurora, Colorado theatre shooting, dozens of AR-15s have been reported stolen in Canada and are presumably, by definition, in the hands of criminals.

If you'd like a copy of the gun-registry data, it is available from Buzzdata.com. Note that this is anonymized data, with the names and street addresses of the registered owners redacted.