Firearms registry couldn’t have prevented killings, opponents say:
Date: Mar 4, 2005 7:55 AM
PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2005.03.04
EDITION: Final
SECTION: News
PAGE: A5
BYLINE: Adam Thomlison and Tara Tosh Kennedy
SOURCE: The Ottawa Citizen
ILLUSTRATION: Photo: Chris Mikula, The Ottawa Citizen / A sombre
RCMPCommissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli announced the deaths of the
officers last night, and also promised a renewed fight against marijuana
grow operations. He called grow-ops ‘major, serious threats to our
society and they are major, serious threats to the men and women on the
front line.’
NOTE: In the Line of Duty

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Firearms registry couldn’t have prevented killings, opponents say:
Target criminals, because ‘criminals don’t register guns’

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Better enforcement of the Canada Firearms Act would have done nothing to
prevent the shooting deaths of four RCMP officers in Alberta, according
to the act’s opponents.

Although the officers were reportedly shot with a high-powered rifle,
which would have been covered under Bill C-68, the gun registry only
targets responsible gun owners, said Ed Hudson, secretary of the
Unregistered Firearms Association of Canada.

Someone willing to kill four police officers wouldn’t bother registering
his gun beforehand, he added.

The Canada Firearms Act was passed in 1995 and took effect in 1998, and
from the start opponents have said it would do nothing to stop criminals
from obtaining and using guns.

The government says roughly seven million long guns — rifles and
shotguns — are now registered, and about two million gun owners are
licensed.

But opponents to the registry say there are about 16 million firearms in
Canada, and anecdotal evidence suggests many gun owners have simply
ignored the law or failed to register their entire arsenals.

Although the act might have decreased the number of suicides and
domestic homicides by rifles and shotguns, the rate of crime involving
handguns has increased in some jurisdictions.

Mr. Hudson conceded that legislation might have prevented something like
the RCMP killings if it targeted criminals. His group has supported
legislation proposed by the Conservative MP and gun-registry critic
Garry Breitkreuz, who has called for a law that would ban people
convicted of violent crimes from ever owning guns.

Sophie Roux, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Professional Police
Association, a group that supports the act, refused to comment, simply
saying, “We can’t go there.”

News of the shooting hit close to home for former RCMP officer Dennis
Young. Mr. Young, now an assistant to Mr. Breitkreuz, worked as a
Mountie from 1967 to 1972 and remembers how two of his colleagues were
killed on duty during a routine call south of Prince Albert, Sask., in
1970.

Despite his personal experiences as an RCMP officer — he was involved
in the manhunt for his colleagues’ killer — Mr. Young believes that
beefing up gun-control legislation would not be an appropriate response
to yesterday’s shootings.

“It angers me that $2 billion is going into the registry, rather than
into the front lines of policing,” he said. The people who did this are
criminals, he continued. “And criminals don’t register their guns.”

He said it would make more sense to track the people who apply for
firearm licenses and are turned down rather than track the people who
register their firearms, he said.

“176,000 people in Canada were prohibited by the courts from owning
guns, and they’re not being tracked,” he added.