GUN REGISTRY NOT EFFECTIVE
AT TELLING POLICE WHERE THE GUNS ARE
By Garry Breitkreuz, MP – February 18, 2005

Not only has the federal firearms program cost taxpayers two-billion dollars when the government adds in enforcement costs, compliance costs and economic costs, but it also doesn’t do what the Liberals promised it would.  On May 20, 2004, Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan reported that one of the primary purposes of the registration scheme is to: “provide police with important information to help prevent injuries and investigate firearm-related crimes.”

But every time we ask the government a question about the real effectiveness of the gun registry, they duck the question by trotting out statistics claiming the police “query” the system 2,000 times a day.  Conveniently, the government doesn’t have any statistics about how many times the police are actually getting any useful information from the system.  We suspect very little because the program does a very poor job at telling police where most of the guns are.

It was recently reported in the media that the Canada Firearms Centre mailed out more than 773,000 free firearm licence renewals and more than 46,000 envelopes were returned as “undelivered.”  How can the Minister claim police know where all the guns are when the federal government can’t even tell police where they live?  But this wasn’t the first time the Liberal brain-trust lost track of tens of thousands of gun owners.  In 2001, they lost track of 38,600 owners of rifles and shotguns.  In 2002, another 24,600 long-gun owners and 11,800 registered handgun owners went missing from their files.

In addition to losing track of more than 120,000 gun owners, here are a few more problems that Minister McLellan fails to acknowledge in her vain attempts to defend her two-billion dollar boondoggle:

1.                  Police do not know where the guns are because the government does not require the 176,000 most dangerous persons who are already prohibited from owning firearms to report their change of address to police;

2.                  Police do not know where the guns are because the government does not keep track of the 37,000 persons with restraining orders against them or the 13,500 gun owners that have had their firearms licences refused and revoked;

3.                  Police do not know where the guns are because there is no legal requirement for gun owners to store their registered firearms at their home addresses or tell the government where they are stored;

4.                  Police do not know where the guns are because the government does not keep track of registered firearms that are loaned between licenced firearms owners;

5.                  Police do not know where all the guns are because as of last August more than 315,000 handgun owners had failed to re-register more than 600,000 handguns;

6.                  Police do not know where the guns are because between 400,000 and one million gun owners failed or refused to obtain a firearms licence and can’t register their guns without one;

7.                  Police do not know where the guns are because according to Statistics Canada firearm import and export records and previous Liberal estimates, the government still has upwards of 10 million guns to register; and finally,

8.                   Even if police do find the guns, there are so few identifying characteristics on the gun registration certificates that it is practically impossible to verify that they are the firearms registered in the system.  For example, all of the 6.9 million registration certificates have been issued without the owners’ names, and five million guns in the registry still need to be “verified” in accordance with police demands.  The last time we checked, there were more than three million blank and unknown entries on the gun registration certificates that have been issued – including almost three-quarters of a million that didn’t have serial numbers.

It is simply not credible for the Liberals to claim that their two billion-dollar registry is of any significant value to police when it is missing so many guns and so many gun owners have gone missing.  So taxpayers should be demanding that the Liberals answer these two questions:  1) How long is it going to take to fix all these problems? And 2) How much is it going to cost us?

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