Montreal has the highest number of licensed shooters among Canada’s five-biggest cities, but you’re most likely to bump into a gun lover in Calgary.
The greater Montreal area was home to 107,711 people with firearm licences at Dec. 31, 2015, the RCMP said Sept. 22 in an e-mailed response to questions from TheGunBlog.ca. Even though Calgary had about half of Montreal’s licences, it ranked first in shooters per capita because of its smaller population.
Canadian law requires a licence to buy or own firearms. The country had 2,026,011 people with gun licences at the end of last year, the most on record. Millions more Canadians without licences shoot and hunt legally using firearms borrowed from family and friends.
Crunching the numbers further:
- About 20 percent of Canada’s licensed shooters live in our five-biggest metropolitan areas (382,564 out of 2,026,011 total licensees).
- The average percentage of licensed shooters in big cities is about half the average for Canada overall (2.95 percent vs. 5.65 percent). It’s the urban-rural divide at work again: most licensed gun owners live outside big cities.
- More than 25 percent of Ontario’s licensed shooters live in the Toronto and Ottawa areas (146,343 out of 569,036 Ontario licensees).
- These stats exclude unlicensed gun owners: (1) “honest” older guys in mainly rural areas (hundreds of thousands or millions of these collectors and hunters?), and (2) “dishonest” younger guys in mainly urban areas (no idea how many of these criminals there are).
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