Canada is just one of many gun-controlled nations. They didn’t use to be this awful, but thanks to Justin Trudeau, they are now and are likely to get even worse as things continue.
And, as has happened pretty much everywhere, it was predicated on stopping crime. That’s what our own domestic bunch tells us, too, and they try to make the claim that crime in all these other countries is so much less than ours.
First, let’s keep in mind that our non-gun homicide rate has historically been higher than most developed nations’ total homicide rates, so that’s a thing that cannot be overlooked when you’re trying to make comparisons with other countries.
But let’s also not pretend that gun control has a lot to do with that. After all, Canada has it, and darn near as extensively as the UK does, and how is that working out for it?
Not worth a damn, actually. That’s not me talking, but John Lott and Gary Mauser, who are criminologists and know more than me.
Comparisons of crime rates across countries often focus on homicides or murders. In 2025, the U.S. murder rate will be about 4 per 100,000 people—roughly twice Canada’s 2024 homicide rate of 1.91 per 100,000.
However, homicides represent only a tiny share of violent crime. In 2024, homicides accounted for just 0.21% of violent crimes in the United States, based on National Crime Victimization Survey estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. By comparison, Canada’s most recent General Social Survey (GSS) on Safety and Victimization, from 2019, shows that homicides accounted for only about 0.022% of a comparable measure of total violent crime.
Although homicides make up a very small share of violent crime in both countries, they account for a much larger share in the United States. Specifically, homicides represent 9.5 times the share of violent crime in the U.S. as they do in Canada. This difference reflects not only the higher U.S. homicide rate but also the dramatically lower overall violent crime rate reported in the United States.
Canada, like the United States, uses two measures of crime: crimes reported to the police and total crime. In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics measures total crime through the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In Canada, Statistics Canada measures total crime through the General Social Survey (GSS), which it typically conducts every five years. We have previously done a similar comparison with Australia.
Although the media and most public discussions focus on crimes reported to the police, victims report only a small share of violent crimes. This distinction becomes especially important when making international comparisons because reporting rates can vary dramatically across countries. For example, Statistics Canada found that victims reported only 29% of violent crimes to the police in 2019. In the same year, the comparable reporting rate in the United States was 41%. In 2024, 48.1% of violent crimes in the US were reported to the police. Everything else being equal, the higher reporting rate in the United States would make its violent crime rate appear 41% higher than Canada’s in 2019 (41%/29%=1.41), even if both countries experienced exactly the same level of violent crime.
Now, there are reasons for this, but if only 29 percent are reported, then that leaves a whole lot on the table that’s not being counted in all of this. While anti-gunners are quick to point out the numbers based on reports, they shouldn’t be.
After all, Canada, despite the legions of gun control laws that make it virtually impossible to use a firearm for self-defense, all of which were sold on the premise of making the country safer, has produced an actual violent crime rate that would cost people’s political careers here in the United States.
Still, even with this relative bias against the US, Canada’s total violent crime rate in 2019 was 295% higher than the rate in the US. Even removing rape/sexual assault to remove the bias agains the Canadian numbers but leaving assault so that there is still the bias against the US numbers, the Canadian violent crime rate is still 175% higher than the rate in the US. In addition, the robbery data is highly comparable between the two surveys and the robbery rate in Canada is 268% higher than in the US. Canadians are about 366 times more likely to be robbed than they are to be a homicide victim.
The burglary rate in Canada is also much higher than the rates in the US — 259%.. Only for the category of “other/household theft” is the rate 19% lower in Canada.
Nor does the U.S.–Canada gap reflect a recent development or different crime definitions. The International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS) asked the same questions and used the same crime definitions across countries. In 2000, it found an overall violent-crime victimization rate of 7% in Canada, compared with 5% in the United States—a rate 40% higher in Canada (Table 2). As with the rest of the analysis presented here, higher rates of assaults/threats and robbery mainly drove the gap. Unfortunately, the ICVS was discontinued.
In other words, this is major, and it’s not particularly new. It’s just gotten a whole lot worse than it was a decade and a half ago.
“Oh, but mass shootings and stuff!” the anti-gunners might retort, but it should be remembered that while we might have more actual mass public shootings than most other nations–and I don’t mean by the bogus standards of anti-gun sites that try to pretend they’re tracking them–our armed population stops a whole lot of them, too. More than a third, to be exact.
It should be noted that other nations with relatively high gun ownership rates don’t have the issues, but they’re also not the United States. The problem isn’t guns, regardless of what else may be contributing to the problem.
As for more pedestrian violent crime, which is what most people are likely to encounter, Canada is nearly three times worse than the United States, and the only reason this isn’t a bigger story is that people just don’t report it. Considering how Canada acts about literally everything else, it’s entirely possible they don’t report it because they don’t want to be considered some kind of bigot or because they just don’t see the point. “I don’t believe you have, mate,” isn’t a new phenomenon, after all, just one that’s been amplified recently.
And what good has the gun control of recent years done? So far, there’s no sign at all that it’s had any positive impact. Toronto, for example, is a prime location for criminal activity, which makes Chicago look as peaceful as a field in Nebraska.
Meanwhile, despite this horrific statistic, there are still those trying to keep Canadians disarmed and make it impossible for folks there to defend themselves.
I’ll never wrap my head around that without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
Then again, over the last few years, the difference between a conspiracy theory and actual news is about six months, so…
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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