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POST Lorne Gunter's Blog - Where did they all go? Posted on June 1, 2005 3:55 PM MDT http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/comment/blog/gunter.html Garry Breitkreuz, the Conservative MP for Yorkton-Melville in Saskatchewan, and his more-than-able assistant, Dennis Young, have asked more order paper questions and filed more access to information requests than any other duo on the Hill, probably more than any other two people in Canada. Nearly all have been about the Liberals' feeble, dysfunctional, meaningless gun registry. Monday, Breitkreuz finally received an answer to his question of Industry Minister David Emerson: Since the government began keeping records, how many guns of all types have been imported to Canada? Between 1966 and 2004, 11.5 million guns were legally imported into Canada (you'll need Excel to open this file – see link below). During that same period, 617,000 were re-exported, for a net increase in Canadian stocks of 10,880,525, or an average of 279,000 a year, just from imports. (And intriguingly, the number has skyrocketed lately, hitting 430,000 in 2003 and 623,000 last year.) This doesn't include the domestic manufacture of firearms, either. Why is this important? Because for a gun registry to be really effective, it has to know where almost every gun -- legal and illegal -- is. If it doesn't know where the guns are, it can't track their safe storage. It can't follow them in the event of theft. It can't keep them out of the hands of those who should not own them and thus prevent crimes such as spousal abuse or murder. And, most importantly, it cannot inform police which homes have guns and which do not. Canada's police chiefs and police associations have supported this charade all along because they have been convinced by Ottawa that the registry would make them safer. It would tell them at which domestic disputes or break-ins or arrest scenes they were likely to encounter guns. Of course, this was ludicrous from the get-go. And I have always been surprised that the organizations representing frontline police officers bought into this fantasy. (The chiefs don't surprise me. Many of them have made careers from buying the snake oil politicians were peddling.) But even though sensible people have seen through the registry from the start, many other hopeful Canadians need convincing. That's what makes the import numbers valuable. As of May this year, Ottawa had registered just over 7 million firearms, including shotguns, rifles and handguns. For this to be meaningful to public safety via the registry, it would have to be nearly 100% of the total. But guns are not like cottage cheese. They don't go bad after a few weeks in the refrigerator. They can work as intended for decades. So if nearly 11 million guns have been imported into the country in the past four decades, and thousands more have been made here each year, and there were lots of guns in the country already when the feds began counting in the mid-'60s, then the likely national stock of arms is in the neighbourhood of 13-15 million, even assuming many have been sold outside the country or deactivated or demolished. And that doesn't include the tens of thousands of guns smuggled into Canada illegally every year. Ottawa has
no clue where anymore than half the guns in the country are, and probably
far less than half. Even if registries could work to reduce crimes (which
they cannot), this $2-billion one would be no use at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAY 2005
- 7,029,163 FIREARMS REGISTERED SO FAR JANUARY 2000
- RCMP: "8.4 to 11 MILLION FIREARMS TO BE REGISTERED" MAY 1976
- JUSTICE MINISTER RON BASFORD: "At the same time, there
has been a steady increase in the number of firearms in Canada.
Estimates place the number at over ten million in 1974, with almost one-quarter
million added to the stock every year. Most of these firearms
are long guns (rifles and shotguns)." |