Thanks very much.
My name's Wendy Cukier. I'm the president of the Coalition for Gun Control, which is a network of 200 public safety community organizations and public health groups.
I am also the co-author of the book called The Global Gun Epidemic, with the past president of the American Public Health Association. I say that because I believe that a public health approach is the most appropriate way of looking at gun violence generally, and gang violence in particular.
When we think of gun violence, we can think of it as cancer. There are different forms. There's no one solution to all problems. If we're talking about domestic violence, if we're talking about suicide, if we're talking about mass shootings or if we're talking about gang violence, they all have a particular etiology or set of causes and solutions.
When we look at gang violence, I will say the following. I'm the head of the Diversity Institute and a full professor at Ryerson University. We've done a lot of work looking at the impact of disadvantage and inequality in Canada. There's no doubt that addressing the root causes of violence is absolutely critical. We know that certain youth are more at risk for gang violence [Technical difficulty—Editor] but that's not what I'm going to talk about today.
Today I'm going to talk about access to firearms, because while firearms do not cause violence, they increase lethality. The best example of this is a comparison between Canada, the United States, the U.K. and Australia. All of these countries have similar root causes. They all have inequality. They all have poverty. They all have racism. Canada, the U.K. and Australia have about the same rate per 100,000 of beatings, stabbings and other kinds of homicides. When it comes to gun violence, however, we see a profound difference. Last year, the U.K., which has twice as many people as Canada, had about 30 gun murders. Canada had 277, the highest number we've seen in many years.
The availability of firearms increases the likelihood that people will die. While it's true that when we look at the sources of guns that gangs use, we know that smuggling is part of the problem. We also know that the diversion of legal guns to illegal markets is a significant problem. Guns are diverted through theft, illegal sales and, in some instances, straw purchases. We saw in the last few days over 2,000 guns that were allegedly stolen recently. We've also seen a number of high-profile incidents like the Danforth shooting, where the gun that was used was from gang members and stolen in Saskatchewan.
There has been, over the last decade, a tremendous proliferation in the legal ownership of restricted weapons and handguns. There are now over a million legally owned in Canada by [Technical difficulty—Editor]. I want to underscore that we support the implementation of Bill C-71. We believe that licensing and tracking long guns is part of the solution and that we need a total ban on military assault weapons and that we need the buyback program.
Fundamentally, we need decisive action to stem the further proliferation of handguns in Canada. Part of that would be a ban on the import and sale of guns where the threat outweighs the utility. You don't use handguns for hunting. You don't need them for pest control on a farm. While arming for self-protection is apparently on the rise, it's not supported, for the most part, by Canadian law.
I want to reinforce one final point. You'll hear this person say, “Anyone can get a gun if they really want to”. You'll hear that person say, “Criminals don't register their guns”, and so on and so forth. I want to remind you that every illegal gun begins as a legal gun, either south of the border or in Canada.