Erhan John Er was sentenced Thursday to 51 months in custody, minus time served, after pleading guilty to conspiring to traffic firearms. The U.S.-born American citizen had bought 28 guns from legal firearms dealers in Florida in the summer of 2022, smuggled them into Canada and resold them to an unidentified Canadian trafficker.
The case matters because those guns did not stay buried in a trafficking file. Court heard that guns smuggled by Er were recovered at 10 crime scenes in York, Durham, Halton, Hamilton, Thunder Bay and Quebec, and that 18 of the handguns have not been recovered. All of the recovered guns had their serial numbers erased. Er was paid $1,000 per handgun, a price that turned a Florida purchase into a cross-border supply line.
Er, who previously lived in Toronto and was living in Sarasota, Florida at the time of the offences, had no previous criminal record, court heard earlier this month. That background sharpened the case against him: this was not a long-running criminal figure working from the shadows, but a man who used a legitimate market in the United States to feed an illegal one in Canada. The sentence imposed Thursday came more than four years after the summer 2022 purchases that set the scheme in motion.
The trail does not end with the sentence. Florida court documents say pistols purchased by Er were later linked to two killings, while Canadian court evidence tied the same smuggled guns to violence in Hamilton, Quebec and Toronto. A 45-year-old Tobenna Obiaga was identified as Hamilton’s fifth homicide victim of 2024 after he was shot and killed following a disturbance at a large house party on Highway 6 in Flamborough. In Toronto, police said as many as 100 gunshots were fired during a shootout near Queen Street West and Sudbury Street around 11 p.m. on Monday, and officers presented video Thursday showing people playing and dancing with firearms before a chaotic gunfight erupted on Queen Street West on Nov. 11.
The sentence closes one chapter, but it also shows how a single trafficking run can spread across provinces and years. Er is now in custody, and the guns he moved from Florida are still being counted against a wider record of killings and street violence that has not finished paying out.
