How guns are getting across the border | Guns in Canada

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the ambassador bridge between Detroit and Windsor Ontario is one of the busiest border crossings in the country Canadian border services have just been given a large infusion of funding to target a rapidly increasing problem gun smuggling across the country last year they seized 751 illegal guns but they know that many more are getting through and contributing to gun violence superintendent Jason Crowley of the Windsor police says gun trafficking is driven by the lucrative market in Canada for unlicensed firearms you will see a gun a firearm purchased in the States for potentially an hour two hundred three hundred dollars and they'll go on the streets for $3,000 $3,500 so there you lucrative for the people that are involved in these kind of activities they hide them they hide them in cars and panels and their cars may be on them all kinds of they're ingenious to be honest the way they've come up with hiding if stopping guns at busy border crossings is tough imagine the challenge in remote areas like the Quebec Vermont border here the frontier is often marked with a pylon in the middle of a field and a slash cut through the woods that goes for miles and miles there's an issue here so then we started increasing how many agents we had US border agent Bradley Curtis brought us to a remote spot where you can see how easy it is to sneak across so this is a border right here pretty much everything on this side they say the United States once you cross this old fence everything on this side that's up in Canada I'm kind of surprised what is border security along the front Quebec border are there motion detectors and what is it that's along the word protect the border at this point we do have sensors we do have camera we have technology that helps us monitor the border area [Music] one of the most remarkable gun trafficking plots in these parts began between the neighboring towns of Derby line Vermont and Stansted Quebec which share many facilities including the famous Haskell free library that actually straddles the border line by tradition Canadians are allowed to cross over to the US side to enter the library without clearing customs if you go in there you can see there's a line that separates the two countries separates the Opera House upstairs there's books on the canyon side they get checked out in American sides so very unique situation it's a tricky thing for Border Services to handle it is yes there's a lot of these strange anomalies across another border this happens to be one of them that we have to work around work with in 2011 34 year-old career criminal Alex black goes from Montreal came up with a clever plan to take advantage of the unique library what he was doing was basically he ended up recruiting these co-conspirators and what they did is they were taking money his money and go down to Florida to buy weapons down in the Tampa area he had arranged to rendezvous at the library with his co-conspirators the accomplices a man and a woman entered the library from the US side without having to clear customs the man went to the Washington had deposited a backpack containing ten handguns in the wastebasket there mr. blackest entered the library from the Canadian side and retrieved the gun bag from the washroom blaka said his accomplices both left the library going in separate directions without raising the suspicions of the u.s. Border Patrol parked nearby a few weeks later black hosts repeated the trick with ten more guns in a backpack this time the border patrol became suspicious and stopped the American accomplices as they departed the library something's not right here you're from Florida you're a rental car why you wired to ask a library that information was was documented and basically it was kind of one of our building blocks going forward that helped the overall investigation the gun smugglers had to come up with a new plan this time they focused on a remote area 30 kilometers east of Stansted at a place called Wallace pong alexis Flacco's had his American girlfriend drop him off near the border where he hoped to cross undetected into the United States with his criminal history and the fact that he's Kenya citizen he was basically not allowed to make illegal entry in the United States so the only way to for him to get into the United States was to illegally enter his girlfriend cleared customs then picked him up on the US side the couple drove off to her hometown of Tampa Florida to buy more guns this was to be their big score black hos had his friends legally by 34 handguns in Tampa days later he was able to cross the border at the same spot carrying the guns he said he did his best to follow the water's edge but he got lost he eventually made it to Canada his girlfriend picked him up and they both traveled on to Montreal his border crossings into and out of the United States went completely undetected I've been with the United States border patrol for almost 25 years there 285 miles of border we have over just over 300 agents that are on the road we can always use more personnel we can always use more technology we do a pretty good job detecting it we're not really at all places at all times Montreal police later found some of lakal seized guns during drug raids and US authorities were able to trace them first to his American girlfriend and then to him he pled guilty in the US for illegally trafficking 104 firearms and served almost two years in a Montreal jail his Canadian lawyer Eric Sutton is not surprised by how easy it was to sneak across the border if that's really what you want to do I think there are multiple opportunities geographically to take advantage of this border and there is some surveillance but they can't possibly control every every linear inch of this border it's impossible it's inconceivable you know they're talking about a handgun ban in Canada now assault weapons ban and what do you think that would do to the situation of the border you know hard to say but human behavior would lead that you know it would lead someone to conclude that if it's easier and cheaper to get it somewhere else they might go that route there's money to be made yes sir they're gonna try to get it across the border yes sir back on the Windsor Detroit border police came across an even more devious gun trafficking scheme dreamed up they say by small-time Canadian gangster Lamar Porter he would buy guns in the US and hide them in gun shops along with the GPS tracking device he would cruise the parking lots of Detroit shopping malls looking for cars of Canadian cross-border shoppers and hide the guns inside their bumpers the cross-border shoppers would then return to Canada along the Ambassador Bridge completely unaware of the guns they were transported guided by the tracking device Porter would then go to their Windsor homes and retrieve the guns in the middle of the night eventually police discovered the gun smuggling route through wiretaps of Toronto gangsters who were buying the guns they followed the gangsters to this Windsor Club where Porter was photographed conducting his gun sale transactions they were all arrested generally how does my birthday price I think intelligence is a big part of it you know people talking right that's part of it you know disgruntled partners friends criminals that's kind of thing somebody gets caught in rats out there part yeah that's that's a that's no honor among thieves I say right gun traffickers frequently tried to grind off the serial numbers from weapons to prevent tracing but police are often able to detect the numbers anyway this is on the polymer part of the firearm so they could sand it they could grind it but a lot of these guns are there they're ingrained in the body of the gun in the in the integrity of the gun that's where they're that's where they're recovered just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there these are all semi-automatic firearms they all fire as fast as you can pull the trigger they'll fire while police find new ways to trace guns criminals are coming up with new ways to obtain weapons like this Elliot Edmonton Police recently found handguns being illegally converted into fully automatic machine pistols which can fire over 30 bullets in two seconds Ontario police found small scale manufacturers assembling guns from easily obtainable parts weapons that would be totally untraceable to be able to find this group that's manufacturing distributing is actually quite unique and is a big deal near a rodeo Ontario gun store owner Wes Winkle says that key parts of weapons can now be made with 3d printers yeah if you have a polymer injection machine or a 3d printer nowadays this type of component is not a hard thing to manufacture you can produce them at high volumes for a relatively little cost and when they're manufactured there's no tracing or no numbers put on them at all and therefore we get the term ghost guns or what are being assembled as a criminal element firearms you know they used to say that every gun told the story not so much anymore not so much anymore another method of gun trafficking in Toronto involves what is called straw buying one University student with a gun licence bought 22 weapons in 16 weeks most from the same store in Toronto then sold them to criminals no one at the store or at the Canadian firearms office raised any alarm about his suspicious behavior Wes Winkle doesn't see straw buying as a big problem so straw purchasing is a hot-button topic and you know it's it's one of those things where they you know there's been some instances however minuscule they are but there has been some where there's been people hired to get a firearms license and then go out and purchase firearms with that license for the criminal element miniscule I saw various cases where a guy goes in and buys 47 guns and and and the gun store owner doesn't report them and the RCMP doesn't seem to do anything about it you know at face value you say that seems to be ludicrous that it's possible that could happen and and you know for the most part when you see that it's been happening through purchases at multiple locations I'm asking now from the point of view of gun sales people shouldn't that trigger a common-sense alarm you do understand the way that every type of retail store there could be as many as 25 different employees running the counter and if you're coming in at different times and different things it's it's difficult at the retail level to remember every face and every name the industry was quite surprised to find out that that's not something that would have been flagged at the Canadian firearms registry we kind of expected that would be the case while police and border security put a great deal of effort and money into countering illegal weapons the truth is that as long as there is a market the guns will keep crossing the US Canada border a greater challenge is to address the demand from Canadian buyers Terence Mckenna CBC News Windsor

Info

Channel: CBC News: The National

Views: 158,720

Rating: 3.8854065 out of 5

Keywords: guns, gun control, violence, crimes, smuggled, border, U.S., Canada, longest undefended border, CBC, The National, Terrence McKenna, gun smuggling, canadian border security, canadian border, illegal guns, illegal gun trade, illegal guns in canada, illegal guns market, illegal weapon

Id: FdDdm-PkhZ4

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2019

Reddit Comments

"Convicted of smuggling 104 firearms, served almost 2 years in a Montreal jail" - This is the real problem, get serious about sentencing criminals.

👍︎︎ 46 👤︎︎ u/garbeth 📅︎︎ May 23 2019 🗫︎ replies

They only recovered 750? That's nothing considering most smugglers are probably bringing 20-30 or more at a time. That's probably not even 10% of what actually gets through. Maybe instead of wasting money on registries, desk jockeys doing paperwork so we can go to the range, laboratories to decide which identically functioning semi autos can be NR, and buybacks our government should invest in giving CBSA the resources they need to impede the flow of these firearms across our border. How many millions of dollars have been wasted on this ongoing Bill Blair handgun ban study alone?

👍︎︎ 19 👤︎︎ u/Torvares 📅︎︎ May 23 2019 🗫︎ replies

Oh snap, looks like they managed to snap a pic of one of those rare in-stock lowers.