“The
police asked for accuracy in the gun registry, but the Liberals give them
something called ‘fuzzy logic’.”
Ottawa
– Today,
Garry Breitkreuz, the Official Opposition’s gun control critic, released
Justice Department documents showing that they estimated it would take between
8.8 years and 6 years to register all the firearms in Canada.
Unfortunately, the Minister of Justice only gave the bureaucracy until
the end of this year to meet the government’s completely arbitrary political
deadline. “Something had to give
and the documents prove that something was accuracy,” commented Breitkreuz.
“In 1999, the Justice Minister agreed with the Canadian Police
Association’s request that the accuracy of the information in the gun registry
be verified. These new documents
clearly state that it would be ‘to time-consuming and costly to verify
every firearm.’ I wonder
what the CPA executive has to say now that the Liberals have reneged on yet
another promise?” asked Breitkreuz.
Page
12 of a Justice Department document dated January 9, 2001 reveals that it would
take 8.8 years to register all the firearms in Canada using the current “full
matching” process and approximately 6 years using the “partial
matching” process. Page 15
and 16 indicate that the department will introduce “fuzzy logic”
into the Canadian Firearms Registration System to enhance the classification of
firearms without human involvement and implement a “filter down”
approach to matching firearm elements to the Firearms Reference Table.
The document also claimed this approach would reduce the amount of
firearm identification information that must be provided by firearms owners.
The
Justice Department documents also revealed the following:
Page
4 -
The RCMP Restricted Weapon Registration System (RWRS) “was not an accurate
inventory of restricted and prohibited firearms.”
After 67 years of operation, everyone must wonder why.
Page
10
- “0.6 million Firearms to be re-registered (i.e. in RWRS) Note: 0.9M
firearms in RWRS, 0.3M remain ‘unclaimed’ post 2002.”
Why will 300,000 registered firearms be “unclaimed”?
Page
12
- “7.4 million registration certificates must be produced by December
21, 2002 (8220 per day from Jan 1, 2001) - Should volumes not start appearing
until March 2002, approximately 18,000 certificates per day will need to be
produced.”
“Guess
what? The volumes have not started
appearing,” said Breitkreuz. Other
documents obtained from the RCMP through the Access to Information Act
reveal that the government has fallen far short of their registration processing
targets between January and November 2001.
The RCMP reports that as of November 22, 2001, only 1,431,731(out of
between 7M and 16.5M) firearms have been registered and as of November 17, 2001,
only 115,347 firearms (out of 900,000) had been re-registered from the old RWRS.
Using
the Liberals 1974 estimates of the number of firearms in Canada and actual
import and export records, there are an estimated 16.5 million firearms in
Canada.
This means the Justice Department would have to process more than 44,000
registration certificates per calendar day before the deadline at the end of
December. In 1994 (for reasons as
yet unexplained), the Liberals dramatically reduced their estimates of the
number of firearms in Canada from 16.5 million to 7 million.
The department updated this estimate as recently as January 6, 2001.
Even if a person accepts the flaws in their 7 million firearms estimate,
it means they have to process more than 16,000 registration certificates per day
before the end of the year. Now
all we have to find out is how many registration certificates they’re issuing
each day?” concluded Breitkreuz.
-30-