DUD GUN REGISTRY MUST GO

It's time for the federal government to toss its ill-fated gun registry where it belongs.

On the trash heap.

After pouring more than $1 billion into this bottomless money pit, the Chretien Liberals should cut taxpayers' losses and admit the entire exercise has been a political failure and a bureaucratic nightmare.

Federal Solicitor General Wayne Easter cast even more doubt about the viability of this ill-fated scheme this week when he admitted an untold number of gun owners' names may have been deleted from the registry after a computer crash.

Easter said the computer system could not handle the intake as gun owners scrambled to register before the Jan. 1 deadline, which was later extended to July 1.

As the new deadline looms, about one quarter of an estimated 1.9 million gun owners have not registered their rifles and shotguns.

Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have all said they will refuse to prosecute gun owners who fail to register their weapons.

Alberta has said it won't co-operate with Ottawa in prosecuting those who fail to register long guns.

The federal government has bungled this right from the start. It insisted that forcing law-abiding hunters and farmers to register their long guns would cut crime, when logic tells us criminals and those with nefarious intent would never register their guns.

In the meantime, it creates a whole new class of criminals.

Rising costs caused by a series of bureaucratic blunders prompted the auditor general to criticize the registry earlier this year as an unforgivable deception of Parliament.

It would have been far more useful to use the vast amounts wasted on this fiasco to strengthen law enforcement. If, as Canadian Alliance Justice critic Garry Breitkreuz claims, no court in the country will prosecute now, this boondoggle has already failed.

The feds should acknowledge this sad reality and scrap the registry immediately.