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This editorial also ran in the following papers: WINNIPEG SUN: REGISTRY PROVES ITS POINTLESSNESS EDMONTON SUN: WASTE OF MONEY CALGARY SUN: REGISTRY OFF TARGET PUBLICATION: The Toronto
Sun -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GUN REGISTRY: 10 YEARS OF WASTE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ten years after the federal Liberals introduced their now-infamous gun registry, pretty much everything opponents predicted could go wrong, has gone wrong. As the critics warned at the time, costs have exploded. A program originally supposed to be self-sustaining financially after a modest upfront investment has now cost taxpayers at least $1 billion and perhaps as much as $2 billion. Imagine what even a fraction of that amount could have done to boost the police presence and fund social programs aimed at at-risk youth in gun-plagued Toronto this summer! As the Sun's Maria McClintock notes in her two-part feature reviewing the registry, ending today, its runaway costs were condemned in 2002 by Auditor General Sheila Fraser. Fraser added that even worse than the misspending was that these cost overruns were hidden from Parliament. Further, as critics predicted, the registry has failed as an effective tool in combating urban street crime, the main way the Liberals sold it to Canadians. Why? Two reasons. First, the main purpose of Bill C-68 was to extend gun registration to so-called "long guns" for the first time -- rifles and shotguns. Unfortunately, grandpa's gopher gun is not the weapon of choice for violent, urban gangsters. Their preferred weapons are handguns, which law-abiding Canadians have been required to register since 1934. Which brings us to the second big problem with the registry, which is, as Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair has noted, that criminals don't register their guns. (Blair sees other advantages to the registry, such as giving police a better idea of who has legal guns in the city, but that's a different issue.) Of course, the Liberals will never admit to this blunder. So, in fairness to all those law-abiding Canadians who rightly opposed this registry from the start, let the record show that it was not the opponents of C-68 who turned out to be the fanatics -- as our liberal media so often sneeringly portrayed them -- but rather the federal Liberals themselves. They were the ones who continued to defend this useless registry, even as its credibility collapsed all around them. Indeed, they continue to defend it today. Talk about being fanatical, to say nothing of irrational! No, on this file, the critics have been right every step of the way. The Liberals should be completely humiliated. WHAT THE LIBERALS CAN’T
OR WON’T TELL YOU ABOUT THEIR $2 BILLION FIREARMS PROGRAM |