PUBLICATION: The Edmonton Sun
DATE:
2004.01.10
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Editorial/Opinion
PAGE:
11
BYLINE:
DOUG BEAZLEY, EDMONTON SUN
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GUN
REGISTRY BREEDS CONTEMPT FOR THE LAW
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Canadians
are supposed to be the good sons in North American politics, the law-abiding
people who never park in ambulance zones and always tip 10 per cent.
And
I ask you, in what other nation on Earth would people suffer a government that
maintains a law that hardly anyone obeys and that half the country refuses to
enforce? A law that's admired only by people who ignore it, and detested by
everyone else?
A
law that exists only to exist, because its creators are too damned gutless to
pull the plug after having wasted better than a billion dollars of our money?
Prime
Minister Paul Martin is, by all accounts, an intelligent man. He may even be as
canny and ruthless a politician as his predecessor. But he'd better take a
warning: having committed himself now to keeping the gun registry intact, he
must realize that the registry is now his problem.
It
used to be Allan Rock's problem. Whatever happened to Rock, anyway?
Martin's
bold statement that his government is "committed to the registration of
weapons" may yet come back to haunt him. For the time being (and until the
spring election), his plan is to shunt the registry and its problems off to yet
another cabinet-level review, with the aim of making the program more
"efficient" and productive.
Those
of us who've been watching this file from the outset know what the outcome will
be. The registry has been tinkered with since day one, by the same crew of
bureaucrats wielding the shovels on this latest review. It's still bleeding us
white. It still hasn't led to any demonstrable improvement in public safety.
Martin
is trying to buy himself some time, using the tactic that served him so well in
the run-up to his leadership coronation: say whatever his audience of the moment
wants to hear.
On
gun control, he has two audiences to placate. Westerners and rural taxpayers
from one end of the country to another hate the registry: to them and us, the
registry sums up all the arrogance and cavalier incompetence Ottawa came to
symbolize during the Chretien reign. (Trust me on this - the registry is every
bit as unpopular in the rural East as it is in the West. I've got family out
there, and they're just as annoyed as we are.)
The
second audience is made up of urbanites, mostly in Ontario and Quebec. They have
heard the message that the registry is wasteful and ineffective - they just
haven't been listening.
To
many of them, merely owning a firearm is an anti-social act: the farmer with a
rabbit rifle in his closet is a murder-suicide waiting to happen. Their
perceptions warped by hysterical media coverage of gun violence - in a nation
where the murder rate is still mysteriously low for our population - they demand
that "something" be done about guns.
Well,
a registry is "something." It doesn't work, but when it comes to
violent crime in Canada, perception is nine-tenths of the law. Check out this
nugget from a recent editorial in the Toronto Star, the boilerplate voice of
Ontario small-l liberalism: "It is wrong to say that Canada's 14-year-old
gun-control law isn't working. It has reduced homicides with legally owned
rifles and shotguns significantly." Since when? Is this more received
wisdom from the feds, along the lines of Rock's hysterical claim that the
registry would save 1,240 lives over a decade? Would it be too much to expect
that debate over the registry fixate on facts instead of wasting more time and
money on salesmanship?
The
real problem with the registry isn't so much the cost. It's not the first time a
government has blown a billion bucks on a fantasy and it won't be the last.
It's
the contempt the registry breeds for criminal law. The problem with Prohibition
wasn't the concept - but the unwillingness of a substantial part of the
population to obey the law.
A
law that isn't obeyed is worse than no law at all. It teaches people to regard
law and government as illegitimate.
That makes bad policy, and bad policy must eventually be abandoned