October
21, 2002
Page
35
Ottawa
has three months left to register 3.4 million firearms
by
Kevin Michael Grace
If
you call the 1-800 number given on the Canadian Firearms Centre (CFC) Web site (www.cfc.gc.ca),
you will be put on hold. You may be told the average wait is seven minutes. You
may find yourself waiting for 15 minutes or more and listening to sub-Doobie
Brothers muzak. You will be told, "Our peak hours of telephone operation
are from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m." (Peak hours are all day?) "You may wish to
call back during off-peak hours." Yes, and you may wish to slam your phone
repeatedly against the wall while shouting obscenities.
Comedian
Glen Foster (www.thatcanadianguy.com) snorts, "What I find amusing is the
claim, 'We are currently experiencing extremely high call volume.' I'm sure
people are rushing to register their guns. People can't wait for the government
to know more about them." Mr. Foster, whom many will remember for his
"My Canada Includes Every B---hing, Whining Province, Aboriginal, Feminist,
Minority and Special Interest Group" T-shirts, found himself in CFC voice
mail hell after his mother received a letter from the agency.
Toronto
Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein reprints the entire letter in his September 29
column. It was addressed to her husband, Mr. Foster's father, who died sixteen
years ago, and it is hardly comprehensible to those whose first language is
English. If she does not register the "restricted or prohibited firearm
registered under the previous legislation" by December 31, she will be in
violation of the Criminal Code.
Nobody
knows if the gun works, or ever did. It is a replica built by Mr. Foster's
grandfather from a sketch. "I'm working up some new material about this for
my routine," he reports. "It's no good for drive-by shootings. 'Go
around the block again; I'm still packing the powder.'" In an attempt to
help his mother, he went to the CFC Web site "which is utterly
useless," and then phoned the 1-800 number "which is utterly useless."
Mr.
Foster has some company. And the gun registry may have serious problems.
Depends on whether you believe the media and the Canadian Alliance or the
CFC and the gun-control lobby. CFC spokesman David Austin admits that 728,000
firearms have been registered without serial numbers. The CFC has issued serial
numbers for these guns printed on laminated stickers. Mr. Austin points out that
many popular firearms were manufactured without serial numbers or with duplicate
serial numbers. And "the stickers are hard to remove." Mr. Foster
might want to consider adding that to his act.
Mr.
Austin denies the claims of Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter that
computer crashes have wiped out thousands of records and that "hundreds or
even thousands" of gun owners "received letters this summer asking
them to re-register firearms they had already registered." Not true, he
says; anyway, "Lorne Gunter and I have never spoken, and I've been here
three
Mr.
Austin states that CFC methodology "definitively" proves the existence
of 7.9 million guns in Canada. "We have 4.5 million unique guns in the
registry now," he says. Will the CFC make the deadline? "The onus is
on the owners."
The
bureaucrat is peeved that this magazine concentrates on the gun registry to the
exclusion of its other work. To wit? "How about licensing of 1.8 million
licence holders? How about safety education for all those people? How about
assisting police in enforcement controls at the border?" Duly noted. When
Mr. Austin is asked the cost of the registry, he provides an answer ($606
million), but becomes truculent. "Can you, off the top of your head, tell
me what the cumulative expenditures of the Department of Defence have been over
the last seven years? Have you ever asked that question? Why not?"
Meanwhile, Canadian Alliance MP Gary Breitkreuz has obtained documents that put
the cost at $1 billion.
Simon
Fraser University professor Gary Mauser comments: "There are a lot of
problems with the registry. If one compares the number of mistakes and long
waits and very scanty amount of information that is collected to the Visa and
MasterCard databases, you can see just how inept the federal registry is.
They're not collecting much of the information they originally said they would,
and they're not verifying it." Is such ineptitude a given?
"Government does not seem to be well-designed to do this kind of
thing. The gun registry is a requirement that has been stuffed down Canadian
throats."
"No
one knows," Prof. Mauser declares, "how many guns there are in Canada.
My best guess is between eight and 15 million." The CFC will not
make its deadline, he predicts, and not only because untold numbers of gun
owners have "forgotten to remember" to register, but also because
others "are taking the principled stand that this information is none of
the government's business." He has been told the CFC is running six months
behind on data collection. So what happens after December 31? "There'll
probably be an unofficial amnesty," he says.
Ryerson University professor and Coalition for Gun Control president Wendy Cukier did not see Tim Naumetz's sticky-serial-number piece or Mr. Gunter's column. In any event, "Lorne Gunter, from my point of view, is not a particularly reliable source." She is sanguine about the gun-registry costs. "If you look at what we spend trying to keep our highways safe, this is small potatoes." Did she read Mr. Goldstein's column on Glen Foster? She replies archly, "I think we read different newspapers."