Firearms in policing: responsibility, risk and the data

Sergeant Martina Ferris opens the first class without a firearm in sight. She puts a single sheet of paper on the projector instead. It is a page from the range log at Port Ardent's indoor range, the one under police headquarters, and it lists every round issued, every round fired and every round returned on one Tuesday in January 2026. The columns balance to the last cartridge. 'This is what carrying a firearm looks like most days,' she says. 'Paperwork, counting, cleaning and checking. Most of you will go a whole career without firing at a person. All of you will spend that career being responsible for a weapon that can end a life in less than a second. That responsibility starts here, with the boring parts.'

Ferris has been a police officer in Port Ardent for sixteen years and has run the range for the last nine. She is the service's range master and senior firearms instructor, which means she writes the range rules, runs the annual requalification, supervises the instructors who help her and signs the records that say each officer is allowed to carry a firearm for another year. She teaches this course with Professor Ray Desjardins, who has taught the program's law and procedure courses. Sergeant Lisa Haddad, who taught the use-of-force material in the less-lethal weapons course, joins several classes.

This course is not range training. Nobody in this classroom will handle a live firearm as part of it. Firearms skills are taught only on a supervised range, by certified instructors, to people who are authorized to carry, and every police service sets its own course for that. What this course does is give students the knowledge that sits around those skills: the safety rules that every shooter in North America learns, how a professional range is run, what police firearms and equipment are and why they are controlled, the general principles of marksmanship, how firearms are maintained and stored, the law that governs lethal force, how stress affects judgment, how officers qualify each year, and what happens after a police shooting. These are the things that a recruit needs to understand before stepping onto a range, and that a supervisor, investigator or member of the public needs to understand to judge whether a firearm was carried and used responsibly.

Who may carry a firearm on duty

In Canada, police officers carry firearms because provincial law and their service's policies authorize them to, and because federal law exempts them from the firearms offences that would otherwise apply. Section 117.07 of the Criminal Code says that public officers, which include peace officers, do not commit the possession and transfer offences in Part III of the Code when they are acting in the course of their duties. The firearms they carry are owned by the police service, not by the officer. In Ontario, the regulation on use of force and weapons made under the Community Safety and Policing Act, which came into force in April 2024, sets out which weapons officers may carry, requires training before an officer carries a firearm, sets technical standards for handguns and requires reports when a firearm is drawn, pointed or discharged. Other provinces have similar rules.

In both countries, carrying a firearm is a condition of the job that can be taken away. An officer who fails a qualification, who is suspended, who is under certain kinds of investigation or whose health makes it unsafe can have their firearm withdrawn. Ferris tells the class that she has withdrawn firearms from officers on four occasions in nine years, three times for a failed qualification that was later fixed with retraining and once for a reason she will not discuss. 'It is not a punishment,' she says. 'It is the service saying that, for now, we cannot be sure this weapon is safe in your hands. Everyone in this room should want that check to exist.'

How often police use firearms

Firearms are among the most visible parts of police work and among the least used. Officers draw them far more often than they fire them, and they fire them at people very rarely. Port Ardent's annual report for 2025, which covered about 61,000 calls for service, shows the pattern. Officers reported drawing a handgun with members of the public present 74 times. They reported pointing a firearm at a person 38 times. They fired a firearm three times to end the suffering of a badly injured animal, usually a deer hit by a car. There was one unintended discharge, at the station's clearing station, which this course will study closely. No officer fired at a person in 2025.

Those figures are reportable because Ontario's regulation requires a report when an officer draws a handgun in the presence of a member of the public, points a firearm at a person or discharges a firearm, apart from training, target practice and ordinary maintenance. Other provinces set similar reporting rules. Desjardins points out that the drawing and pointing figures are not a sign that something went wrong. Officers draw their firearms when they reasonably believe they may need them, such as when approaching someone reported to have a gun. The report exists so that supervisors can see the pattern, check that each draw was justified and spot officers or situations that need attention.

The national picture

Canada has no single official count of people killed or injured by police firearms. Researchers and journalists have filled the gap. The Tracking (In)Justice project, a research database led by academics, documented 745 deaths across Canada from 2000 to 2023 in which police used intentional force, and found a steady rise in such deaths over that period, particularly deaths from police shootings. Provincial oversight bodies, such as Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, publish reports on each case they investigate, which allows the public to see what happened in individual shootings.

Marco DiSanto asks why the numbers matter to a recruit who just wants to learn to shoot safely. Desjardins answers that every one of those deaths was investigated, many were reviewed by courts or inquests, and the lessons from them shape the policies the students will follow. 'The rules you will learn about drawing, pointing, warning shots, moving vehicles and medical aid were mostly written after something went wrong,' he says. 'Knowing the data is how you understand why the rules exist.'

A safety culture

Ferris describes the police range as a safety culture, a place where everyone is expected to follow the rules every time, to watch for mistakes in others, and to speak up without fear when they see one. The idea comes from fields such as aviation and medicine, where people learned that serious accidents usually come from small errors that line up. On the range, nobody is too senior to be told to keep their finger off the trigger. 'The chief gets corrected on my range,' Ferris says. 'He thanks me for it.'

A safety culture also means reporting mistakes, including your own. An officer who has an unintended discharge, who loses track of a magazine, or who notices a damaged holster is expected to report it immediately. A service that punishes every honest report soon stops getting reports. A service that never holds anyone accountable soon stops having rules. Ferris says that the balance is hard and that she will come back to it when the class studies the clearing station incident.

Three incidents this course follows

Three fictional incidents from Port Ardent run through the course. Each one teaches a different part of firearms responsibility, and each was reviewed by the service.

The third incident is the most serious and is still before the courts. The man, Dale Vossberg, has been charged and has pleaded not guilty. His trial is scheduled for 2027, and he is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The course studies the officers' decisions, which have been reviewed by the oversight bodies and the service, not the merits of the charges against him.

Desjardins makes a final point about language. The course will use the phrase lethal force for force that is intended or likely to cause death or serious injury, which includes firing a firearm at a person. The Criminal Code uses the phrase 'force that is intended or is likely to cause death or grievous bodily harm.' Police training sometimes uses softer phrases, such as 'neutralizing a threat'. 'In your reports and in your heads,' Desjardins says, 'call it what it is. Firing your weapon at a person is using force that may kill them. Everything in this course follows from taking that seriously.'

The table shows that, even counting every draw and point, an officer in Port Ardent drew or pointed a firearm about once for every 545 calls in 2025, and fired at a person in none of them. Rates like these let a service compare one year with another and its own patterns with those of services of different sizes.