A report compiled by Gary Mauser and John Lott, Jr. shows gun-controlled Canada has “a serious crime problem” and explains how the crime levels escape the attention of Canadians.
Writing in the Toronto Sun, Mauser and Lott note that comparable levels of crime between the U.S. and Canada is often skewed by a focus on homicide rates. Thus, seeing that the “the [2025] U.S. murder rate…will be about four per 100,000 people, roughly double Canada’s 2024 homicide rate of 1.91 per 100,000,” leads many to surmise that Canada is much safer than the U.S. and that is the end of the discussion.
However, Mauser and Lott point out, “…Homicides represent only a tiny fraction of violent crime. In 2024, murders accounted for just 0.21% of violent crimes in the United States. In Canada, according to Statistics Canada’s 2019 General Social Survey (GSS), homicides represented only about 0.022% of total violent crime.” And when the reader looks deeper than homicide rates he is reminded “Canadians are far more likely to experience assault, robbery or other violent crimes than homicide.”
For particulars, Mauser and Lott not that a more thorough understanding of crime in the U.S. can be had by reading the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and, in Canada, the Statistics Canada conducts the General Social Survey (GSS). In reading the findings of these two surveys one sees that Canadians do not report crime to police on levels seen in the U.S., and that alone skews the subsequent differences between levels of actual crime and reported crime.
This can give Canadians a false sense of security. (For instance, Mauser and Lott observed, “The police-reported violent-crime rate in 2019 was 885 per 100,000 people, while the GSS estimated total violent victimization at 8,300 per 100,000. Police statistics therefore captured only about 10.7% of violent crime measured by the survey.”)
Compounding the perception derived from the lack of police reporting, Canada’s specific definition of certain crimes is different than that of the U.S., making comparable understanding difficult. The differing definitions and survey approaches “[tend] to inflate U.S. violent-crime totals relative to Canada’s.”
However, even in this scenario, in 2019 “Canada’s overall violent-crime victimization rate was 295% higher than the U.S. rate. Even if sexual assaults are excluded to reduce differences in definitions, Canada’s violent-crime rate remained 175% higher.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected].
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