EDITION: Final

SECTION: Editorial

PAGE: A6

SOURCE: Southam News

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Gun registry doing little to make us safer

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The federal licensing and registration system for shotguns and rifles and their owners is so wasteful and ineffective, even Canadians who support greater gun control should be outraged. Budgeted for $85 million over its first five years, the registry has cost nearly $700 million, and counting. This fiscal year, the government budgeted $35 million, but in November asked Parliament for another $114 million.

All this money is doing little to make Canada safer. Four policemen have been shot in the past several weeks, two fatally. The percentage of attempted murders that involved a firearm increased from 31 per cent in 1995 to 37 per cent in 2000. The number of homicides that involved a gun also increased.

But the program is creating disrespect for the law, by wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and through widespread non-compliance. All Canadians, no matter how anti-gun, should demand that this end.

To address runaway expenditures, the processing centre in Miramichi, N.B., will within weeks lay off half its staff, even though tens of thousands of licence applications for owners backlogged, and processing has barely begun on millions of gun registrations.

The government has advertised its desperation to increase compliance by reducing or even waiving the fees (adding to the overall cost.) This "special-offer-just-for-you" approach, used across the country in phases, demonstrates failure. No aspect of our criminal law should require marketing as if it's the latest household gadget.

Even after layoffs, the firearms scheme will have more than 1,500 employees. And while many Mounties and other police officers have since Sept. 11 been diverted from investigations of organized crime, drugs and gangs to address security, about 200 remain uselessly attached to the firearms fiasco.

Even if the registry was efficient, it might never achieve a reduction in crime. With the help of the Library of Parliament, Saskatchewan Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz recently analysed Statistics Canada figures on robberies in 2000. Of more than 21,000, only 392 were committed with guns that might be included in the new registry. Knives, fists, threats, kicks and bats were more often weapons in robberies than guns.

And almost 90 per cent of guns used were either already illegal (sawed-off shotguns or machine guns) or handguns, which are most often smuggled into Canada. No registry could prevent those guns from being used in such crimes. The registry directs law enforcement time and money away from criminals, the opposite of what Canada needs.

Nearly 60 per cent of guns used for murder are handguns, subject to registration since 1934. Registration hasn't prevented handgun murders from more than doubling over the past 25 years. Registering shotguns and rifles will be no more effective.

When B.C. ceases to administer the federal program March 31, only Quebec, Ontario and the three Maritime provinces will still be co-operating (and Ontario is only handling owner licensing, not gun registration.)

Ottawa's claim that the registry has kept a few thousand more people from acquiring firearms than the previous system did is disingenuous. Had a fraction of the staff and money been devoted to enforcing the old Firearms Acquisition Certificate system, refusal and revocation rates would have been just as high.

Frustrated with federal insistence that all gun control efforts be put into the registry's porous and pointless basket, Metro Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino has set up his own 23-member gun crime squad. Sensibly, Fantino's officers focus on criminals who use illegal guns, rather than having a bureaucracy leaning on duck hunters and skeet shooters while praying that such expensive efforts have some positive effect on crime rates.

For nearly 12 years, the Australian state of Victoria operated a gun registry much like Canada's. It was abandoned in 1995. The registrar conceded that not one crime had been solved or prevented, the whole exercise "an elaborate system of arithmetic with no tangible aim."

Ottawa should admit the same. This is not gun control. It is an utter waste.

Comments on today's editorial can be sent to Southam News at commentsn@sns.southam.ca, c/o Murdoch Davis, editor-in-chief, or to The Guardian at letters@chg.southam.ca