--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Laws make bad memorials

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The timing of a private member's bill that would abolish the long-gun registry --it passed second reading in the House of Commons last month, with the support of MPs from three parties -- has produced anguished cries from within Canada's anti-gun movement. Dec. 6 was, after all, the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, a uniquely revolting event in Canadian history that is widely regarded as the primary impetus for creating the registry in the first place.

"This is so vicious, it's amazing," Suzanne Laplante-Edward -- mother of Anne-Marie Edward, one of Marc Lepine's victims -- told The New York Times this week, in reference to the elimination of the gun registry. "The gun-control law is a monument erected to the memory of our daughters."

But laws must rise and fall on the basis of proper public policy, not emotionalism. And our remembrance of the Montreal Massacre does nothing to change the fact that the gun registry never made Canada a safer place. While we certainly understand why the mother of a gun-violence victim would want our government to do anything possible to restrict firearms access, no one in our society has the right to proclaim a law morally untouchable. No one.

Memorializing victims of violent crime through law is a dangerous habit, in any case: It generally leads to both bad law and bad memorials. That is because laws made in this manner are usually over-reactive and ill-thought out. Inevitably, they require tinkering or even outright elimination -- which is then interpreted as an insult to the original victims, leading to bitterness and hard feelings all around.

The long-gun registry's direct logical connection to the Montreal Massacre has always been elusive. Lepine legally owned his murder weapon. There's every reason to believe he'd have registered it too, had he been required to do so. Even advocates of the gun registry are hard-pressed to set out a scenario by which the registry might have changed the tragic outcome of events. This, for instance, is the best that a flailing Toronto Star writer was able to come up with: "While Lepine might not have gotten a licence today, he could have picked up an unregistered gun from a friend. Without the registry, it would likely never be tracked back to the original owner."

On a recent episode of our editorial board's Full Comment Podcast, Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, pleaded misunderstanding on this point. "The reason why legislation passed in 1991 and again in 1995 had less to do with the Montreal Massacre per se," she said, than with a long-standing campaign led by public health and women's groups. It's a "misconception," she claimed, "that the Montreal Massacre was what this gun law was intended to prevent." And yet, like most gun-registry supporters, she seems to want to play it both ways: She took no issue with Ms. Laplante-Edward's view of the law in a Dec. 6 op-ed in the Star lamenting the registry's perilous condition. Indeed, Ms. Cukier began by evoking Lepine's bloody rampage. "How astonishing that 20 years after the massacre, the law is being dismantled," she wrote in the op-ed -- a sentiment that has been the dominant talking point among pro-gun-registry types this week.

We don't envy the task Ms. Cukier and her fellow travellers have in selling the registry on non-symbolic grounds. The more honest advocates -- and Ms. Cukier typically isone-- will concede that their statistical case for the registry relies heavily on correlation rather than causation, and on crediting laws passed in the 1990s for positive crime trends that began in previous decades. They will admit it's impossible to prove that the registry itself, as opposed to tougher gun control in general, is behind our falling crime rates, and that they can point to very few (if any) concrete examples where the registry prevented or solved a crime that a less intrusive scheme couldn't have.

Such leaps of faith are involved in many pieces of legislation, of course (not least the federal Conservatives' push for mandatory minimum sentences). But that doesn't change the fact that specious reasoning, abuse of statistics and naked appeals to emotion are an awful foundation on which to build, or defend, a multi-billion dollar white elephant like the gun registry.