PUBLICATION:          The Toronto Sun

DATE:                         2004.12.11

EDITION:                    Final

SECTION:                  Comment

PAGE:                         18

COLUMN:                  Editorial 

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REGISTRY DOESN'T STOP CRIME

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JUST A few days ago, Liberal ministers in Ottawa were defending their failed gun registry by invoking the names of the 14 women slain by a crazed gunman 15 years ago at Montreal 's Ecole Polytechnique.

They shouted down critics of the registry, saying it must be kept -- despite wasting nearly $1 billion -- in memory of those women, and in the hope of protecting other women from such a fate.

Yesterday, in Brampton , another woman -- a teacher -- was gunned down. This time it was outside a high school. Her husband was later arrested.

Please, can we now put aside the myth that the gun registry protects women, children and other innocents?

The nine-year-old registry is a bureaucratic tool; a list of those who own rifles and shotguns. (Handguns must also be registered -- that's been the law since early in the last century, although they still proliferate on our streets.)

A registry has limited usefulness: Essentially, it serves as a reference so police can find out if, say, the person they are about to arrest has a legally registered gun in the house.

It does not, obviously, indicate whether the person has an illegally obtained, unregistered firearm.

And it does not prevent anyone bent on taking a gun to a school -- or anywhere else -- from wreaking havoc.

Yet to hear Liberals like Anne McLellan and Jean Lapierre talk this week, the registry is virtually all that's standing between innocent Canadians and all-out gun lawlessness on our streets. (They should spend more time in the GTA.)

They shamed fellow Liberal MP Roger Gallaway -- who merely attempted to stop the feds spending $80 million more on this mess -- into dropping his motion.

In so doing, they scrapped a golden opportunity for their government and PM Paul Martin -- who, remember, promised to "review" the registry -- to finally end this mistake.

They also proved they're prepared to put politics ahead of real concern for crime victims, who have called for years, along with many cops, for tougher enforcement of existing gun laws (and even tougher new ones) to replace the long gun registry's pointless red tape.

As for efforts in memory of the victims of the Montreal massacre, we can do much better than the gun registry. Efforts to raise awareness of domestic violence, for instance, have come a long way, but there's clearly much more work to do.

The Liberals could start by signalling they take real crime seriously -- as seriously as they take brave fellow caucus members who refuse to toe the party line.

AND ANOTHER THING ...

WE'D ALSO like to hear the Grits answer how someone who's managed to get deported 20 times -- yes, 20 times -- keeps getting back into the country. Guess we're lucky the repeat American deportee (from yesterday's Sun) apparently confines his crimes to fraud -- and not, say, terrorism.