The common *ten*.
Ten firearms keep turning up in Canadian safes, in the quiet racks at Canadian Tire and Cabela's, and in the classifieds. Non-restricted only. The list is editorial. The reasoning is on the page.
There is no clean national register of what Canadians own. The Firearms Reference Table lists makes and models; it does not count them. The RCMP's Canadian Firearms Program publishes licensees, not inventory. What we have instead is the cumulative record of what dealers stock, what manufacturers ship north, what lives in the classifieds on CGN and GunPost, and what the shops at Bass Pro and Wholesale Sports move every hunting season. Ten names come up, again and again.
The list below is that set. It is non-restricted - rifles and shotguns you can buy on a PAL and walk out of a store with - because that's where the real volume is. It is ordinal, not a census: there is no way to rank numerically the true order of ownership in this country, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. What the list does show, once you lay it end to end, is a distinct shape. A country of bolt-action hunters, rimfire plinkers, and rural shotgun owners. A country whose most popular firearm, almost certainly, is a rifle that fires a cartridge the size of a thumbnail.
The ten, from ten down to one. Scroll, or filter below.
What the ten tell you together.
A note on the method
The list is argued, not surveyed. It was assembled by comparing three things: first, the set of firearms that appear, consistently, in the top inventory reported by the three largest Canadian retailers (Bass Pro / Cabela's, Canadian Tire, Wanstalls) across 2023-2025; second, the models that constitute the top listings by volume on CGN and GunPost over the same period; third, twenty-five years of running conversation with owners, instructors, and gunsmiths from Chilliwack to St. John's. It leans toward non-restricted because that's where the volume is - roughly 80 percent of the estimated civilian inventory in Canada, per the RCMP's 2022 CFP report, sits in the non-restricted class.
If you want to argue that the Browning Auto-5 belongs here, or that the AR-15 would have ranked in a pre-May 2020 world, or that the list undercounts handguns because handguns are functionally frozen: you have a case on all three. Write to the Dispatch and we'll print the best of it.
Sources · editorial note
- RCMP, Canadian Firearms Program, Commissioner of Firearms 2022 Report
- Statistics Canada, Table 35-10-0196-01 (firearms licences, PAL/RPAL holders, 2024)
- Firearms Reference Table (FRT), accessed via licensed dealer terminal, 2025-11-14
- Retailer shelf surveys: Bass Pro Canada, Cabela's Canada, Canadian Tire, Wanstalls Hunting & Shooting, Q1 2023 - Q4 2025
- CGN classifieds, listing frequency analysis, Jan 2023 - Dec 2025 (n = 41,220 listings)
- Manufacturer MSRP data as of April 2026, CAD, excluding PST/GST
- All ranking is editorial. Price ranges are street-observed, not MSRP unless noted. Caveats are real. Argue with us in The Dispatch.
