PUBLICATION: The Moncton Times and Transcript
DATE:
2003.03.27
SECTION:
Opinion/Editorial
PAGE:
A3
COLUMN:
James Foster
BYLINE:
JAMES FOSTER City Views
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Do
the math on gun registry
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Ok,
we were wrong. Those of us who have been saying for years that a gun registry
would cost a billion dollars and would only list a fraction of Canada's legally
owned firearms (and none of the illegal ones) were in error. We admit it. It
turns out the cost will likely be twice that much about $2 billion - once the
policing, enforcement and hidden costs are factored in. Silly us. I guess we
yokels who own guns are too stupid to be able to add 1 + 1, or more accurately,
$1 billion + $1 billion.
The
national media still doesn't get it, too. It was almost, but not quite, funny to
watch the reaction of these cufflinked, starched-shirted scribes react in horror
earlier this year when the auditor general announced that the supposed $2
million gun-registry program would actually cost you and I about $1 billion by
the time the next 18 months roll around.
Where
were they five years ago when newspapers like this one said the very same thing,
time after time? But hey, if it doesn't come out of Toronto or Ottawa, it isn't
worth the ink.
Even
to this day, national pundits talk of the auditor general's report stating the
costs of the gun registry could rise to $1 billion - even though that's not what
she said at all. Not even close.
What
she said was that she didn't have enough information to even guess at how much
the final bill will be, and that the $1 billion figure was calculated using only
the information the federal government had not squirreled away from her prying
eyes.
Yet
for some odd reason big-city media, which usually relishes pouncing on scandal,
keeps using the $1 billion figure.
So
do those Liberal MPs who know the real story and who are secretly against
wasting more money on this garbage while police in their hometowns go begging
for new computers and manpower. Yet those spineless wonders wilted like
jellyfish sitting on hot sand and dared not vote against pumping more of our
cash into this joke of a gun registry, under threat of the prime minister's
boot.
At
least a few abstained from voting in favour of more money for this fiasco, or
simply stayed away from the house that day - a small mercy indeed.
The
truly alarming part is how federal politicians and big-ego media sages continue
to equate a gun registry with gun control. Canada had very strict, and very
cost-effective, gun control before this registry business ever came along -
something that most Canadians seem unaware of since they have never owned a gun
and have no interest in using one. These are the people who have long wondered,
and rightly so, what is the big deal about registering a gun. Well, the answer
stares us in the face: $2 billion to maintain a list of gun owners and the
firearms they own, but which doesn't include the firearms they've chosen not to
register, and doesn't include illegal guns, and doesn't check out the
backgrounds of those registering the guns unless they are already in the system
as a red flag. What use is that? What good is that to a police officer?
The
Canadian Taxpayers Federation did a little math on Monday in a bid to put the
ridiculously low $1 billion estimate into some perspective. With a billion
dollars, we could:
Allocate
$3,235 additional money to solving every single violent crime committed in all
of Canada last year.
Dramatically
increase gun safety by buying 21 million trigger locks, 21 million gun-carrying
cases or seven million steel gun cabinets.
Put
out a $1.8 million reward for every single murder committed in Canada last year.
Pay
for nearly half of the cost of every adult in jail for an entire year.
Cover
the policing costs of Canada's illegal gun capital, Toronto, for two years.
With
gun owners estimated to be in every third New Brunswick household, this
province's Liberal MPs should consider less what their boss wants them to do,
and more what their constituents want them to do. Maybe we can't add $1 billion
and $1 billion, but we do know how to vote.
And
we know enough math that we can cipher the difference that $2 billion would make
to our loved ones on waiting lists for medical treatments, to our elders whose
life savings go to perpetual care, to our crumbling municipal infrastructure,
and especially to our police community who solve more crimes every day than any
partial list of guns owned by a fraction of Canada's law-abiding firearms owners
could ever solve in any Liberal MPs' wildest fantasies.