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RCMP in Halifax have changed how they keep track of guns after they were unable to account for three carbines for seven months.
During a routine audit in June 2025, the Halifax Regional Detachment discovered it could not locate three of its long guns.
Carbines are semi-automatic rifles which are shared among officers who are trained to use them, with a requirement for members to sign them out when needed.
Early Wednesday afternoon, public information officer Const. Mandy Edwards confirmed to CBC News the RCMP had done a thorough search for the guns over seven months and still could not locate them.
She said the force had conducted a full inventory of carbines, checked with other detachments across the province to see if the guns had been transferred or borrowed, and checked with the training and maintenance sections to see if they had been left behind.
Edwards said they had also added the guns to the Canadian Police Information Centre database, as is policy for lost or stolen items. She said police never believed the guns were stolen.
She said the RCMP did not inform the public it was unable to account for the carbines because “there was no evidence to suggest they were out in the public realm.”
She acknowledged the Mounties had no idea where the guns were.
Three and a half hours later, Edwards said the guns had been found — and that the force now believed they were never really missing in the first place, but rather there had been a clerical error.
Guns listed on 2 inventories
Edwards said the carbines had been listed on the inventories for two detachments: Cole Harbour and North Preston. The guns showed up in one detachment’s audit as they should, but because they were registered twice they showed up as missing in the other detachment’s audit.
Police were looking for the guns in Cole Harbour, but they were at the North Preston detachment, about 10 kilometres away.
The Halifax detachment has now made two changes: to conduct an inventory audit once a month instead of four times a year and a new system for signing out carbines.
Under the old system, officers would have to use a logbook in the room where the long guns are located to record their name, along with the date and time they were signing out the gun.
Now the RCMP in Halifax has put QR codes on each long gun, allowing officers to scan the code with their RCMP-issued cellphones to log the firearm. This also now allows supervisors to conduct random compliance checks online from any location.
The federal Department of Public Safety directed questions about these changes — and whether it expects the RCMP to inform the public when it cannot locate guns — to the Nova Scotia government.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the provincial Department of Justice said the province is confident the RCMP will continue to put further preventive procedures in place.
Lost guns are rare, former detective says
Michael Arntfield, a former police detective with the London Police Service and current criminology professor at Western University, says the RCMP likely would have been informed by street-level informants or undercover officers if their weapons had made it to the streets of Nova Scotia.
He says clerical issues with inventory can happen with anything in police custody, but police seldom lose track of a gun.
“It’s easy to mislay stationery or, you know, a set of boots, but a firearm of that scale is very rare,” Arntfield said in an interview.
He also underscored the importance of police departments being able to maintain accurate records.
“Chain of custody of items in their possession is central to their authority and then, the public trust,” he said.
“So if you don’t know where three guns are, do you know where all the exhibits for your forthcoming trials are?”
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