A group of children in the St. John’s neighbourhood of Shea Heights were playing outside last spring, when they made a shocking discovery.
“They came home and said that they found a gun,” said the mother of one of the children.
“We were in disbelief.”
Lying on the ground in a wooded area behind some homes was a 9-mm Taurus handgun.
It was loaded.
“It was just like something you’ve seen in a movie and it was very eerie,” the woman said in a recent interview.
“This could have been a completely different outcome.”
CBC News is not identifying the families involved due to safety concerns. Police have not yet identified who used the gun — and what they used it for — before it landed in the hands of children.
Police do, however, believe they know where it originated — thousands of kilometres away in Georgia, a state with some of the weakest gun laws in the United States.
Last May, a group of children came across this 9-mm handgun that appeared to have been ditched in a wooded area behind houses in the St. John’s neighbourhood of Shea Heights. (Mark Cumby/CBC)
The potential consequences of criminal activity crossing into the path of innocent civilians isn’t lost on Const. Mitchell Ryall.
“The risk comes in where — especially with handguns — they’re a little harder to aim, a little harder to control,” Ryall said in an interview.
“And those risks certainly increase … of an innocent bystander or someone’s loved one or just a passerby being struck with a round.”
WATCH | Inside efforts to trace illegal guns and slow a surge in gun violence:
A deep dive into gun crime in Newfoundland and Labrador
Police in the province are seizing more firearms than ever before. RNC and RCMP officers talk to the CBC’s Ariana Kelland about the surge and what they are doing to fight it.
The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officer is seconded to the RCMP’s National Weapons Enforcement Support Team.
Ryall investigates firearms that come into the custody of the RNC — and lately, that’s been often.
“In the run of a week or the run of a month, I’m seeing more handguns now than I ever would have within the last couple of years that I’ve been in this position,” he said.
Ryall’s role is to support the work of investigators by finding out whatever he can about a firearm used in a crime or seized from a person or place.
Part of that is working with the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre (CNFTC) to track the weapon back to where it originated, in an effort to stop the flow of weapons both inside and outside of the country.
Data provided by the CNFTC shows it tracked a record-number of guns from the province last year, including 45 handguns and 245 long guns.
The majority of the weapons traced in 2024 were domestically sourced, meaning they originated within the country. Nearly the same number could not be conclusively traced. That same year, there were three guns identified as being smuggled into Canada.
Ryall says there are a number of factors that can stall investigations into the origin of a firearm, like obliterated serial numbers, a scarcity of information about long gun ownership, and gun modifications.
However, Ryall says federal legislative changes in 2022 aim to help investigators cut down on domestic trafficking, by making it mandatory for firearm purchasers and sellers to contact the Canadian Firearms Program for licence verification before transferring gun ownership.
“What they’re trying to do there is cut down on illegal transfers or unauthorized transfers of firearms, but as well domestic trafficking — straw purchasing — as we sometimes call it,” Ryall said.
“So someone going into a gun shop with a valid licence, purchasing a gun and then passing it over to a criminal entity who may be prohibited or otherwise unable to get a firearm.”
PHOTOS | Guns seized by RNC during recent investigations:
Insp. David Emberley, the Newfoundland and Labrador RCMP’s top organized crime investigator, attributes increased gun crime to a swell in the drug trade.
It goes beyond what is ever reported, Emberley says.
“In this city, I would suggest almost every day there are drug rips,” Emberley said, referring to when a trafficker, sitting on a large quantity of drugs or cash, is robbed by other criminals.
“And typically in those cases, they don’t call the police. So you’re dealing with dangerous people. Firearms are part of that world. They need them for self-defence, protection, extortion control. It’s all part of that life.”
Emberley also notes a change in the type of firearms being seized during police searches.
The RCMP found a loaded assault rifle next to the headboard of a suspect’s bed and a loaded tactical shotgun in a closet during a search of a home in St. John’s. (RCMP NL)
“I can remember one we did here in St. John’s,” he said. “It was this drug warrant. When we went in the suspect had a loaded handgun on the night stand next to his bed.”
Despite the targeted nature of drug crime, Emberley warns that everyday civilians can also be caught in the crosshairs of gun violence, as has happened in other parts of the country.
“When you got criminals going around with loaded guns, obviously it’s a worry,” he said.
“Sooner or later, somebody’s going to get hurt.”
The proliferation of guns in the community is also being noted by the courts.
Ammunition in an Easter basket
Judge Harold Porter denied bail to a woman accused of drug trafficking in St. John’s in 2023.
When police entered her home — which she shared with her children — they found a 9-mm semi-automatic carbine rifle along with a magazine capable of holding 30 rounds of ammunition.
Porter noted there was no safety or trigger guard on the carbine.
Shotgun rounds and rifle ammunition were found in a child’s Easter basket in the kitchen of her house.
“We are seeing the proliferation of firearms among serious drug dealers here,” Porter wrote in his decision.
“Whether for their protection from other dealers, or from the police, it is clear that the drug world poses a very serious threat to public safety on multiple levels.”
‘Unfortunate reality we face’
The risk level has gone up so dramatically, Emberley says, that it has changed the way police enter a suspect’s home to conduct a search.
The community can see it in the increase in shelter-in-place notices and the escalation of armoured police vehicles and tactical units being deployed in public.
Justice Peter O’Flaherty noted the heightened public risk during a recent sentencing for a drug trafficker from Torbay, who was also convicted of six firearm offences.
“Our police force now regularly resorts to the use of a tactical unit to arrest drug traffickers for legitimate officer safety reasons,” O’Flaherty wrote in his June 2025 decision.
“As the facts of this case show, local cocaine traffickers possess firearms, including prohibited handguns, as ‘tools of the trade.’ That is the unfortunate reality we face in 2025.”
Often when high-risk scenarios happen in the St. John’s area, Sgt. Devon Thompson and the Tactics and Rescue Unit (TRU) are there.
Thompson is the RNC’s first member assigned full-time to the unit.
“It’s not lost on us that when we get deployed out with TRU [it’s] a bit intimidating,” Thompson said in an interview.
“We recognize that and unfortunately, the stuff we wear or the tools we’re bringing or the trucks, is a response to the type of calls that we’re dealing with, the risk involved with that.”
He says the unit’s goal is to contain a potential violent incident from spreading out into the neighbourhood.
Thompson says his team was called out over 50 times last year — averaging about one a week. In comparison, TRU was used approximately 20 times the year before and 10 the year before that.
“I’ve been on the tactical unit for 10 years now, so for a few years when I first joined, you wouldn’t really get into double digits,” Thompson said.
“So we’ve gone up exponentially.”
Sgt. Devon Thompson leads the RNC’s Tactics and Rescue Unit. He is the first member assigned full-time to the team. (Katie Breen/CBC)Members of the RNC Tactics and Rescue Unit respond to a weapons offence at an apartment building on Brazil Street in St John’s in late August 2025. (Darryl Murphy/CBC)
Thompson believes the increase in weapons taken off the streets can also be attributed to an increase in police focus, with a new drug and weapons enforcement unit that began as a pilot project.
“Newfoundland has kind of fought it off for years and tried to slow that down by putting resources into these units,” he said.
“Where the other provinces have gone through these, we’ll say evolutions and the growing pain of dealing with this, we learn from that, learn from what they did right and what went wrong.”
Tracing crimes across provincial borders
The information you can get from a firearm — where it’s been and what it’s been used for — are like pieces of a puzzle, says Const. Mitchell Ryall.
According to the Canadian Integrated Ballistics Identification Network (CIBIN), police from this province have sent over 300 firearms for testing since 2020, as well as 300 cartridge cases and 73 bullets.
In four cases, CIBIN was able to link evidence taken from crime scenes in Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador. Testing was also able to link firearms to different crimes within the province to each other.
As for the path of the handgun found in Shea Heights, Ryall says that remains under investigation.
The what-ifs still haunt the mother of one of the children who found it.
“We all think if we’re not involved in things like that … it won’t affect us,” she said.
“Our children were in the woods and building forts, where everyone says they should be, where they should be safe. They weren’t far. And so to realize that doing something so simple could hurt one of them severely or you know, God forbid, kill one of them, was a really scary thought.”
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