FIVE REASONS WHY POLICE OPPOSE GUN
REGISTRATION
by Garry Breitkreuz, MP (Yorkton-Melville) June 28, 1999
Contrary to what the Liberal government and the media have been telling you for the last five years, the police do not support the mandatory registration of between 7 and 20 million legally owned rifles and shotguns. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police supports the government’s ill-conceived plan but not all Chiefs of Police support it, nor do the majority of police under their command. The Canadian Police Association (CPA) supports the government’s billion-dollar boondoggle but not the majority of police officers whose views they are supposed to represent.
Every poll ever taken of front-line police officers shows opposition ranges between 75% and 100%. For example, 100% of the 19 police chiefs in the Province of Saskatchewan are opposed to registry, 91% of the serving RCMP officers in Saskatchewan are opposed, as are 76% of the members of the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers.
The bad news for the government is that police opposition is growing. In the Spring 1999 issue of the Canadian Police Association Express (Issue 46), Bernie Eiswirth on behalf of the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers wrote: "Saskatchewan Police Association representatives had polled their members on the six points of the Canadian Police Association resolution about the Gun Bill. The members responded overwhelmingly against the gun registry. The Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers believes the money could more effectively be used in other areas of policing such as fighting organized crime, and human resources for all police services in the country." A number of newspapers have recently reported that pressure from the rank and file members has forced the CPA to reconsider their support for the gun registry at their annual general meeting to be held in August.
Here are the five key reasons why police opposition to the firearms registry is growing:
1. Costs exceed benefits and the costs of the registration scheme are out of control
In 1995, Justice Minister Allan Rock told the House of Commons that the firearms registry would only cost $85 million over five years. An Access to Information Request reveals that at the end of March 1999, the government had spent $216 million dollars and the Department of Justice now admits they will spend between $50 and $60 million a year to operate the system. That’s more than a billion dollars by the year 2015. We won’t know the whole truth until the government gives us the 172 pages of documents they withheld citing "Cabinet Confidences" as the reason. While bureaucrats in the Department of Justice were misleading Canadians by telling them there were only about 200 bureaucrats working in the firearms registry, the Research Branch of the Library of Parliament was preparing a report which put the actual number at between six and eight hundred. That’s 600 to 800 paper-pushing bureaucrats taking hundreds of millions away from real police work that could actually improve public safety.
2. Cuts and lack of police resources for real crime fighting initiatives
Here are the headlines of a few news stories published in recent months:
3. Information in the registry will be riddled with errors
The public was told by the government that the primary purpose of the firearms registry was to let police know which houses have firearms in them. But that only works if the system doesn’t have any errors. Every computer system in the world has errors except, we are told, the computers in the Canadian Firearms Registry. In response to an Access to Information Request, the RCMP said the Firearms Registry "has not done any studies or reports, or does not have any correspondence relating to error rates." I guess if you don’t do any studies on error rates you can deceive yourself into thinking that there are no errors in your system. A few weeks ago, the RCMP’s Registrar of Firearms told a staff meeting that they were experiencing virtually a 100% error rate. In a "secret" report prepared by the consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Dept. of Justice, they estimated a 20% error rate. The Minister of Justice’s handpicked User Group on Firearms estimated a 50% error rate. If you were a police officer, would you rely on a computer system that was riddled with errors to tell you whether the house you were called to had guns in it or not? I don’t think so. Would it even be worth taking the time to look the information up on your computer before responding to the emergency call? Not very likely.
4. Millions of guns won’t be registered in the system because of non-compliance
The government states this costly new tool will benefit police by letting them know who has guns and who doesn’t. However, just as error rates make the registry unreliable, so does non-compliance. In 1997, the government hired the polling firm of Environics to do a survey titled, "Firearms Owners Intended Compliance with Gun Registration and Licencing." The survey revealed that only 58% of firearms owners planned to register all their guns. This represented a significant drop in compliance since 1995, when an even larger, more reliable survey reported that 76.7% of gun owners said they would register all their guns. If you were a police officer would you rely on a registration system that is projected to be missing records on millions of firearms? Once again, I don’t think so.
5. Alienating millions of honest citizens that police rely on to help them do their job
Finally, and most importantly, the government has made a serious mistake in targeting honest, responsible Canadians with their politically motivated gun registration bill. Duck hunters and target shooters never were and never will be part of the violent crime problem in Canada. The Commissioner of the RCMP even said so in a 1997 letter to the Department of Justice, "The RCMP investigated 88,162 actual violent crimes during 1993, where only 73 of these offences, or 0.08 per cent, involved firearms." In 1996, Statistics Canada reported in Canadian Crime Statistics that there were a total of 291,437 crimes of violence. Of this total, there were 121,291 violent incidents where weapons were involved but only 6,375, or just 2.2%, that involved firearms. Of the violent offences where firearms were involved, 74.9% involved handguns [almost all unregistered] and only 6.9% involved rifles and shotguns. Still the government ignores this evidence and plods ahead spending hundreds of millions to register 20 million rifles and shotguns which represent only 0.15% of the violent crime problem in Canada. So if hunters, farmers, collectors and sport shooters aren’t the problem, why criminalize and tax their remarkably safe and totally legitimate pastimes? What the government has done is turn 7 million law abiding firearm owners into potential criminal suspects. Consequently, this useless registry has undermined respect for the law and those dedicated officers who are required to enforce it. Out west, many are now referring to the RCMP as "Chretien Cops." This does not bode well for achieving our goals of fighting real crime and making our streets safer.
Police know who the real criminals are and they know how to catch them. Police desperately need more human resources and more effective crime fighting tools. Unfortunately, the Liberal’s bogus gun registry isn’t one of those tools. In fact, it’s depriving police of the resources they need to improve public safety and save lives in Canada. It should be scrapped immediately.
If you would like more information, please call, write, fax or e-mail:
Garry Breitkreuz, MP (Yorkton-Melville) House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6