Gun laws and disobedience: Billion-dollar boondoggle has dominated gun control debate

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There must be room in every democratic society for the use of civil disobedience.

Without it, there might still be racial segregation in the United States, apartheid in South Africa and an Iron Curtain across much of Eastern Europe.

Civil disobedience overturns unjust laws. It restores human rights, dignity and freedoms.

More than 700,000 Canadians have been practising civil disobedience for over a year and a half. They are the licensed gun owners who haven’t yet complied with the registration provisions of the federal Firearms Act.

There has been opposition to this plan of the federal government since its inception in the early ’90s. Recently the debate has focussed on costs.

When the registry was first introduced by the Liberals, it was expected to cost $2 million, with most of the $119 million in expenses to be covered by registration fees. Then Auditor General Sheila Fraser revealed that the registry cost, not including registration fees, would total $1 billion by 2005, and the “billion-dollar boondoggle” was born.

Just days before the June federal election was called, in order to appease those 700,000 gun owners, Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan announced that the cost of the registry would be capped at $25-million a year and registration and transfer fees would be eliminated.

The costs of the system, and its political implications, have too often sidetracked the central issues: gun owners’ rights and freedoms as they balance against public safety and the efficacy of the system.

Here’s how the Canada Firearms Website explains the need for the registration system:
- Registration links owners to their guns. By ensuring accountability, owners will be more likely to safely store their firearms and quickly inform police if they are stolen.
- Extensive background checks are conducted on every person who acquires a firearm to keep firearms from people who pose a threat to public safety.
- An online registry allows police to know what firearms may be present when responding to calls of domestic dispute or threatened suicide.
- Tracing guns recovered at crime scenes is easier if they are registered. Long guns are associated with many firearm-related crimes in Canada.
- Registration will help curtail the trafficking and smuggling of firearms and facilitate the enforcement of prohibition orders.
- Any gun sales identified as having potential problems are sent for more in-depth investigation.”

Dissenting gun owners say they feel like criminals having to comply with these regulations while the real criminals, who don’t register their illegal guns, commit murders and other crimes. Now they say the registry is useless because of low compliance.

Canadians aren’t fooled by the self-fulfilling nature of this argument. And the majority of citizens who support gun registration don’t look upon gun owners as criminals.

Ultimately, civil disobedience, in order to succeed, must prove its argument to society at large. It’s not working.

Right now, most Canadians feel safer with the laws than without them.