National Post Editorial: First guns, now kegs
Date: Jan 13, 2007 12:44 PM
PUBLICATION: National Post
PAGE: A18
DATE: 2007.01.13
SECTION: Editorial
EDITION: National
SOURCE: National Post
WORD COUNT: 420

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First guns, now kegs

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Now that the federal government has gotten all of Canada’s firearms duly
and properly registered — feel free to take a pause here while you
finish giggling — a few enterprising Ontario policemen have come up
with a new way to fight crime by intruding on private life and piling up
mountains of information: a beer-keg registry.

The idea is the brainchild of London, Ont. police chief Murray Faulkner,
who suggests that beer-store clerks should be obligated to record the
name, address and other personal information of anyone who buys a keg.
Chief Faulkner says that such a record would allow his force to more
easily hold someone responsible in the event of noise complaints,
underage drinking and other ills connected with keg parties.

As the National Post reported Wednesday, he is backed by Kingston, Ont.
chief Bill Closs, whose city devolves into a scene from a Hogarth
etching once a year during Queen’s University’s homecoming week. The
idea is under review by the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, and
has already been discussed with the Liquor Control Board and the Alcohol
and Gaming Commission. (Remind us again why Ontario needs both a board
and a commission to handle booze?) Some Ontario MPP is bound to take up
the idea sooner or later.

Some 21 U.S. states have keg registration laws on the books. A study
published last year in the management journal Evaluation and Program
Planning found that enforcement was spotty and that no one inside or
outside state governments has yet attempted to measure the effectiveness
of any keg law. Do Chiefs Faulkner and Closs have some undisclosed
source of evidence that such laws have positive consequences? If not,
what would justify the conscription of liquor clerks as police
informants?

Anyone who has lived on a university campus knows how obnoxious and
destructive keg parties can be. But it is not some mystical property of
the keg itself that creates the problem. At the very least, facilitating
arrests and lawsuits of keg buyers seems capable of creating an
incentive for frat-house binge-drinkers to switch to spirits. And before
long, some trend-conscious officer of the law would be calling for
digital transponders to be implanted into glass bottles. Inanimate
objects, after all, are ever so much easier to police than human beings.

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !