Straw purchasers

[Au revoir, Gopher]

I came across this article about the Edmonton Police Service Firearms Investigation Unit. This caught my eye:

" Hapke has been a detective with the unit since it was created in 2019.

He says when it first started, investigators were mainly focused on cracking down on straw trafficking — the act of buying guns legally and then selling them illegally — but the landscape has changed."

I thought that was odd, I know straw purchases do happen but is it really a big enough problem that they would need to put together a team to 'crack down' on it?

I went looking for some statistics on the topic and found that there are none (surprise!). Any 'official' reports I could find on the subject used words like "significant issue" or "increasing problem" and usually lumped straw purchases in with stolen firearms.

But I did come across this article from TheGunBlog.ca.

"A researcher dug through public documents from the past 16 years and found 1.6 people are charged each year on average. Some years have zero, other years have four times the average."

Even if all the cases were in Edmonton, it doesn't seem like it would require an eight man team to investigate.

ARG

[fps plus]

And I wonder why the RCMP special report says Canadians are angry and ****ed off.

Wife and I just paid accting firm $1100 to file trust accts to help our elderly parents and today they say we don’t need to do it any longer . Deadline to file was April 3. Whose gonna get my $1100 back

I guess we all need to be on “ double secret probation “!

[cowmanbob]

Read a newspaper article once about a Ndp election sign that got run over on a rural road and a team of investigators were on the case.

[NCC]

Don't forget about the Alberta wild boar tactical team that has likely never seen a wild boar on the hoof. They may as well be hunting sasquatches on the tax payer's dime.