Globe and Mail Editorial: The long-gun registry is ripe for dismantling
Date: Jun 20, 2006 8:10 AM
PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE: 2006.06.20
PAGE: A16
SECTION: Editorial
EDITION: Metro
WORD COUNT: 603

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The long-gun registry is ripe for dismantling

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Critics of the Conservatives’ gun-registry bill claim the Tories are
removing a central plank in the country’s gun-control regime. In fact,
they are removing a minor plank, and a rotten one at that.

The long-gun registry is only one small part of Canada’s wide-reaching
system for controlling the use and ownership of firearms. If the
long-gun registry is abolished as the Conservative government proposes,
Canadians will still be required to register handguns, which remain so
tightly restricted that the previous government’s proposal to ban them
was redundant. And they will still be required to get a licence for
whatever kind of gun they want to own — pistol, rifle or shotgun. That
means they will have to go through a series of safety and background
checks designed to ensure guns don’t end up in the hands of dangerous or
irresponsible people.

So the critics are wrong. The government isn’t stripping the authorities
of their gun-control powers at the very time gun violence is on the
rise. Rather, it is getting rid of an effective, cumbersome, famously
costly measure that did little to enhance public safety.

As Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day noted yesterday when he
introduced his bill, it was always fanciful to think that tracking down,
describing and registering every duck rifle and gopher gun in the
country was going to make a dent in gun crime. The effect was to make
thousands of law-abiding gun owners feel like criminals while creating a
vast government bureaucracy that has already cost the public more than
$1-billion.

In her updated report on the matter last month, Auditor-General Sheila
Fraser said that while the Canada Firearms Centre had improved its
financial reporting since her bombshell report in 2001, there were still
lots of problems. The nifty new computer system that is supposed to
handle all the centre’s data is behind schedule and over budget, with a
cost approaching $200-million. Accounting standards are still so
loosey-goosey that officials were able to shuffle $21.8-million in
spending from one fiscal year to another without telling Parliament.

Most tellingly, Ms. Fraser found that, despite years of effort, the
information in the centre’s database is incomplete and often faulty. The
value of a duck-rifle database was always doubtful.

A faulty duck-rifle database is next to useless. If police cannot be
sure of the information they’re getting when they run someone through
the firearms computer, how does it help them? Police chiefs say they
would like to keep the long-gun registry regardless. Lawmen don’t like
to give up any implement in their tool box, and they say that police
officers routinely check the database when they are going into
potentially dangerous situations such as domestic disputes. But the
database never contained information about the illegal, unregistered
weapons that pose the greatest danger to police. And even without a
long-run registry, police would still be able to check whether a suspect
had a licence to carry a firearm.

Even if the registry were as useful as the police claim, its efficacy
would have to be weighed against its cost — something the police don’t
have to worry about. Wouldn’t the millions being wasted trying to track
mostly law-abiding long-gun owners be better used to crack down on gun
smuggling or to help troubled youths in the big cities turn away from
crime? Ridiculously expensive, marginally useful, enormously infuriating
to many, the long-gun registry richly deserves the burial the Tories are
preparing for it.

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BILL C-21 An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act
(non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor
restricted) first reading, June 19, 2006
http://www.parl.gc.ca/39/1/parlbus/chambus/house/bills/government/C-21/C
-21_1/C-21_cover-E.html

NEWS RELEASE: PUBLIC SAFETY AND EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS CANADA
Ottawa, June 19, 2006 — Today in the House of Commons, the Honourable
Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, tabled legislative amendments
to free Canadians from the requirement to register their non-restricted
firearms.
http://www.psepc-sppcc.gc.ca/media/nr/2006/nr20060619-en.asp