Canada may pride itself on not being the Wild West of gun violence, like its neighbour to the south. But it can still do better.

The reality is Toronto police are concerned about gaps in gun control laws that they say are putting more legally purchased Canadian guns into the hands of dangerous criminals.

That’s not their only worry. They have also seen a spike in criminals using rifles and shotguns for crimes since the former Harper government shut down the long gun registry in 2012.

Now their concerns are rightly being taken up by Mayor John Tory, who shared them in a letter last week with Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.

As Tory put it, he wants only one thing: “To get the guns out of the hands of those who choose to do harm and are hell-bent on disrupting our peaceful city.”

His letter was sent as 2016 closes out with a spike in gun-related homicides as well as non-fatal shootings. (As of Sunday night, 39 of Toronto’s 67 homicides of 2016 were gun-related.)

The mayor says his main worry is the “shocking” fact that there is “no limit on the number of firearms any one licensed gun owner can purchase and possess.”

Indeed, as the Star’s Betsy Powell reported last month, that “gap” allowed Andrew Winchester, for one, to use his one firearms licence to buy an astonishing 47 Berettas, Walthers and Glocks and 48 boxes of ammunition from two stores over just six months. He then transferred 43 of the guns to a middleman and was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2014.

Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer noted at the time that all those guns purchased by a single individual did not raise any flags with the stores, the Chief Firearms Officer or the Canadian Firearms Registry.

In fact, police say they are catching gun dealers because the weapons they sell are turning up at crime scenes and can be tracked back to them, rather than because of red flags that should be raised for them by firearms officers and registry officials.

Tory also told Goodale he is concerned about the increasing use of long guns in crime. While he says he recognizes “a re-instatement of the long-gun registry may not be practical at this time,” he is urging Ottawa to “examine some form of tracking for sales of these weapons as well.”

Tory is right to take a stand on both these fronts, not just for the city, but for the country. Ottawa should listen and make his requests a priority for action in 2017.

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The Liberals did, after all, campaign on a platform that promised to repeal some of the legislative measures the former Conservative government passed in 2015 in Bill C-42 — which effectively watered down gun control laws — and to introduce further efforts aimed at reducing gun crime in Canada.

It’s high time they acted on both of those promises.

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