The long-gun registry is ripe for dismantling

GLOBE AND MAIL 2006.06.20
PAGE: A16 Editorial
Metro Edition

The long-gun registry is ripe for dismantling

Critics of the Conservatives' gun-registry bill claim the Tories are removing a central plank in the country's gun-control regime. In fact, they are removing a minor plank, and a rotten one at that.

The long-gun registry is only one small part of Canada's wide-reaching system for controlling the use and ownership of firearms. If the long-gun registry is abolished as the Conservative government proposes, Canadians will still be required to register handguns, which remain so tightly restricted that the previous government's proposal to ban them was redundant. And they will still be required to get a licence for whatever kind of gun they want to own -- pistol, rifle or shotgun. That means they will have to go through a series of safety and background checks designed to ensure guns don't end up in the hands of dangerous or irresponsible people.

So the critics are wrong. The government isn't stripping the authorities of their gun-control powers at the very time gun violence is on the rise. Rather, it is getting rid of an ineffective, cumbersome, famously costly measure that did little to enhance public safety.

As Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day noted yesterday when he introduced his bill, it was always fanciful to think that tracking down, describing and registering every duck rifle and gopher gun in the country was going to make a dent in gun crime. The effect was to make thousands of law-abiding gun owners feel like criminals while creating a vast government bureaucracy that has already cost the public more than $1-billion.

In her updated report on the matter last month, Auditor-General Sheila Fraser said that while the Canada Firearms Centre had improved its financial reporting since her bombshell report in 2001, there were still lots of problems. The nifty new computer system that is supposed to handle all the centre's data is behind schedule and over budget, with a cost approaching $200-million. Accounting standards are still so loosey-goosey that officials were able to shuffle $21.8-million in spending from one fiscal year to another without telling Parliament.

Most tellingly, Ms. Fraser found that, despite years of effort, the information in the centre's database is incomplete and often faulty. The value of a duck-rifle database was always doubtful.

A faulty duck-rifle database is next to useless. If police cannot be sure of the information they're getting when they run someone through the firearms computer, how does it help them? Police chiefs say they would like to keep the long-gun registry regardless. Lawmen don't like to give up any implement in their tool box, and they say that police officers routinely check the database when they are going into potentially dangerous situations such as domestic disputes. But the database never contained information about the illegal, unregistered weapons that pose the greatest danger to police. And even without a long-run registry, police would still be able to check whether a suspect had a licence to carry a firearm.

Even if the registry were as useful as the police claim, its efficacy would have to be weighed against its cost -- something the police don't have to worry about. Wouldn't the millions being wasted trying to track mostly law-abiding long-gun owners be better used to crack down on gun smuggling or to help troubled youths in the big cities turn away from crime? Ridiculously expensive, marginally useful, enormously infuriating to many, the long-gun registry richly deserves the burial the Tories are preparing for it.