2006 Annual Report of the Canada Firearms Centre

The Commissioner of Firearms today released the 2006 Annual Report of the Canada Firearms Centre, the federal agency in charge of administering Canada's national gun registry.

The Centre has been a service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police since May 2006. Prior to that date, it had been a stand-alone agency. The transfer was intended by the government to bring about a more effective alignment of gun control measures with inter-agency law-enforcement efforts to combat gun crime.

Among the highlights for 2006:

• as of December 31, 2006, there were 7,102,466 registered firearms in Canada;
• approximately 176,000 individuals were subject to firearms-prohibition court orders;
• the Canadian Firearms Registry Online, a database available to police agencies to respond to emergencies and to assist in investigations, received 6,432 queries per day in 2006, for a total of 2,347,680 firearms-related queries from police about things such as the serial number or registration certificate number of a firearm, or the name and address of an individual and the number and type of guns that person owned