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Surprise, surprise: more gun-registry propaganda

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On Monday, the Toronto Star editorialized in favour of keeping Canada's wildly expensive gun registry.

Surprise, surprise!

If the new Conservative government goes ahead with plans to scrap the national databank of firearms it would be "a national tragedy," according to the paper's editors. Why? "Because the registry is at last working as it was originally intended," an assertion against which the Star offered no new proof, just the same hoary myths registry supporters always trot out: Police use the registry thousands of times a week. The registry has led to thousands of unfit owners being denied licences. The existence of a universal registry encourages legal owners to store their guns more safely, etc.

Oops, sorry, the Star did come up with one novel argument -- a real doozy: The registry should be kept because "it is more than paying for itself through fees charged to gun owners."

This will come as a great relief to the federal Finance Department -- and a great shock since the registry alone is still running annual deficits of more than $10-million, and the entire federal firearms program each year costs tens of millions more than it brings in.

At the very least, the cost just for registering guns runs to over $30-million a year. Licensing owners, enforcing gun laws, fixing the registry's computers (they are constantly in need of repair), advertising the glories of the registry, funding gun control groups to lobby to keep the registry open -- all that costs over $100-million.

At most, fees charged to owners raise $15- to $18-million a year, half of what registration alone costs, and a pittance next to the total cost of the entire federal gun scheme.

In their exuberance to prove the registry's worth, the Star's editors seem to have mistakenly treated the amount of fees raised every five years -- up to $90-million -- as though this amount were raised every year, then concluded the firearms program had finally reached a break-even footing.

Their other defences of the registry are also whoppers.

The CFRO (Canadian Firearms Registry Online) may indeed process thousands of police-generated information requests each day, but the vast majority of these "hits" are not deliberate. As many as 80% are likely generated automatically when officers call up records from the nation police computer system. That system reflexively searches the firearms computers, a statistic that Ottawa then counts as police use of its registry.

Hundreds more of these daily police hits are merely officers checking to see whether someone seeking to register a new gun is already a licensed owner. Hardly a crime-fighting tool; more like a bureaucratic file check.

It is true, as the Star asserts, that "since 1998, the registry has assisted ... in revoking or turning down" 16,000 licence applications. But it is also true that this is a lower rate of refusals -- less than 1% -- than were rejected under the pre-registry screening system run by the RCMP.

It's difficult to fathom what the Star means when it says "the registry is at last working as it was originally intended," unless the system's original goal was to become a money-devouring, bureaucratic cock-up with no tangible effects for making Canadians safer.