Advocacy

Seventy-three per cent more RPALs, and the paper found little

Restricted licences grew 72.88 per cent from 2013 to 2019. A new Canadian working paper found little evidence of a strong link with deaths or crime.

Advocacy · Commentary. Restricted firearms licences grew 72.88 per cent from 2013 through 2019. Registered handguns grew 52.19 per cent. Canada's adult population grew 8.3 per cent.

Two economists used the RCMP's municipal counts to look for a matching rise in firearm deaths and crime. Their new working paper found little evidence of a strong relationship.

Every time I show a PAL at a Canadian firearms counter, the legal market identifies itself before the sale begins. That ordinary friction gave Derek Mikola and Matthew D. Webb a source most Canadian firearms researchers lack: a measurable firearms market.

Holdover produced the feature as a fictional Canadian club-room reading scene. The people, room, printouts, and moment do not depict the paper's authors, their institutions, the RCMP, Statistics Canada, or an actual club.

The formal market left a trail

Mikola and Webb obtained annual counts of valid licences and federally registered firearms by census subdivision through an access-to-information request. They matched the 2013-2019 RCMP records with restricted death microdata from the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database, police-reported crime from the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey, and taxfiler controls.

Their preferred model compares changes within the same city over time while accounting for differences tied to the city, province, and year. The mortality analysis covers 1,015 city-years. The crime analysis covers 225 city-years in larger metropolitan areas.

The coverage has a hard edge. The firearm counts include registered handguns and restricted or prohibited rifles. Ordinary non-restricted rifles and shotguns sit outside that registry data. The illicit market sits outside it as well. The paper measures the formal market because licensed owners and registered firearms leave records.

The tables resist a slogan

The friendly result comes first. The authors report total homicides as unrelated to PALs, RPALs, handguns, rifles, and the residual firearm category. Across most preferred mortality specifications, licence measures show no statistically significant relationship with firearm deaths by assault, self-harm, or unknown intent. Legal handguns show no relationship with total firearm deaths, assault deaths, or self-harm deaths.

The same tables contain findings owners will like less. Legal handguns are positively associated with handgun deaths. Registered restricted and prohibited rifles are positively associated with police-reported firearm violations, including discharge, use in an offence, and improper storage. Some PAL coefficients are positive for first-degree murder and manslaughter. Other coefficients run in the opposite direction.

The authors urge caution around those crime results. Manslaughter is rare and shows large swings across cities and years. Rifles and handguns also move together within cities, with a reported correlation of 0.6519, which makes a clean firearm-type story difficult.

One translation deserves the full sentence. The paper reports a small, persistent PAL association with total firearm deaths: roughly 3,846 fewer PAL holders per 100,000 people for one fewer firearm death per 100,000. The sample mean is 4,639 PAL holders. The number is statistically interesting and enormous in practical terms. The authors also say they did not adjust for multiple testing or the small number of clusters.

Their conclusion is careful. Canada's training, background-check, and storage system appears to permit substantial legal ownership without a systematic rise in firearm deaths or crime. They also state that the result does not show that licensing reduces crime.

The limits belong beside the conclusion

arXiv carries the paper as a working paper awaiting peer review. The design estimates associations. It has no random assignment of firearms or owners, so it cannot establish cause.

The geography leans urban. The RCMP response omitted Montreal, surrounding municipalities, and Quebec City. Missing municipalities enter the data as zero. Rare deaths, a short seven-year window, and limited variation inside each city make small effects hard to detect. An underpowered null result leaves room for an effect the model could miss.

Those limits narrow the claim. They do not create a contrary Canadian result. The paper offers a new administrative view of the licensed market, publishes the adverse coefficients beside the friendly ones, and tells readers where the design bends.

Ottawa can clear this bar

Public Safety Canada describes the handgun freeze and wider federal firearms programme as parts of a comprehensive response to gun violence. The strongest case for targeting the licensed market is administrative reach: government can identify it, regulate it, and count it.

That reach creates an evidence obligation. The paper covers years before the 2022 handgun freeze and the current compensation programme, so it cannot judge either policy's outcome. It can still test the premise that more legal owners or registered firearms bring more harm. Its answer is weak, mixed, and far smaller than the certainty used to sell another restriction.

Canada built a legal market that leaves a trail. Two economists filed an access request and followed it through the death and crime tables. Any new restriction on licensed owners should arrive with analysis at least as serious.

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