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Gun registry: Still wasting tax dollars

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If Canada's criminals registered their firearms, and deadly weapons smuggled from the United States were similarly registered, the billion dollars spent on Canada's firearms registry might seem like a wise investment.

But criminals don't register their firearms and the registry, despite what its proponents claim, has not made for safer communities. The program, which was only supposed to cost taxpayers $2 million when it was introduced in 1995, hasn't taken guns away from criminals or removed them from city streets.

Last week, Windsor police seized a .357 handgun during a drug raid on a home in the 500 block of Janette Avenue. That weapon had been reported stolen from the United States and wasn't registered in Canada. Nor were the 10 semi-automatic weapons police took off the streets in late April. Those non-registered firearms included one with a laser-sight and a Tec-9 machine pistol with a 30-round clip. Good police work, not the useless registry, netted those guns.

The .22 calibre Beretta that Jack Pharr used to gun down 22-year-old Brian Bolyantu in downtown Windsor wasn't to be found in Canada's gun registry and neither was the .357 Magnum that Kenyatta Watts used to kill Mohammed Charafeddine. People like Pharr and Watts don't register their weapons.

The only people who register their firearms are law-abiding citizens who are being unfairly targeted by an ill-conceived program designed to score votes in urban Canada at the expense of rural residents.

How does forcing an Essex County hunter to register his rifle make downtown Windsor safe from gunplay? It doesn't and it never will no matter how much money the government pours down the black hole of the gun registry.

Given that Canadians must register vehicles and even obtain licences to go fishing, city dwellers often fail to sympathize with the plight of Canada's long gun owners. Whether or not our streets are safer, many reason, registering a weapon seems logical enough given its deadly potential. The government regulates everything else, so why not guns?

That argument would carry considerable weight if not for the fact Canadians were required to obtain Firearms Acquisitions Certificates and endure background checks before obtaining firearms even before the firearms registry. This country had a system in place and the Liberals replaced it with an additional layer of unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy.

For an ineffective and superfluous registry that was only supposed to cost $2 million, Canadians have spent an average of $100 million per year since 1995. Now, the Liberal government wants Canadians to spend even more.

The government is seeking an additional $64 million for the registry today and Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz has introduced a sensible motion to nix $49,564,000 for Canada's Firearms Centre and a second motion that would cancel $14,550,000.

The Liberals, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois and NDP, could defeat Breitkreuz's motions and divert those precious tax dollars to a wasteful and ineffective gun registry that takes money from taxpayers' pockets while leaving guns in the hands of criminals. This would be unfortunate and unconscionable.

The gun registry hasn't made our streets safer and the program has been woefully mismanaged from its inception. It has been so poorly run that a U.S. firm used it as a case study in financial mismanagement and incompetence. Wasting more money on a registry that is failing to keep you and your family safe just doesn't make sense.

It's time to scrap the gun registry. It's time to put it out of its misery.