Put a bullet in the costly long-gun registry already

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Put a bullet in the costly long-gun registry already
By John Chambers
Posted 3 days ago
Stephen Harper's Conservatives need to follow their plan and do what, until now, they have been unable to do — finally kill the national long-gun registry.

Since 1995, the federal government — you and me — has shelled out about $2 billion for a national long-gun registry that the liberals claimed would cost $120 million.

Not that spending $120 million on a program doomed to fail was a good idea in the first place, but $2 billion? That's a lot of money that could have been spent much more wisely on improving health care, improving education, improving transfers to provinces, shoring up CPP, improving unemployment insurance, and the list goes on and on.

Proponents of the registry argue it saves lives and that ultimately it is a public safety issue. If it is, it's a whack of money to spend on only partially fixing the problem.

Since 1934 all handguns in Canada have been subject to registry, while all automatic weapons were prohibited in 1977.

So in the end the $2 billion registry is about having farmers and private landowners forced to register their rifles and shotguns. With the recent spate of gun deaths in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton, it's doubtful any farmers were on the trigger side of those crimes.

Punks, by and large, commit gun crimes, with illegal, stolen, or smuggled weapons.

Instead of wasting any more money on a registry with no practical use or hope for improved public safety, law enforcement officials, judges, society in general, and would-be victims would be better served by the implementation of tough mandatory minimums. Use a gun in the commission of a crime — handgun, long-gun, any gun — and look forward to spending the next 25 years behind bars. No good behaviour, no earlier parole, no special treatment. Done, finished, gone.

There's a reason the long-gun registry was doomed to failure — it targeted innocent people under the guise of public safety. It did nothing to address criminals that will commit gun crimes regardless of a registry.

There are some who will argue mandatory minimums do not act as a deterrent to crime; perhaps not. But do we really care? If the premise behind the long-gun registry was public safety, mandatory minimums achieve that goal. Take offenders off the street once and for all.

Stephen Harper has the votes, now he just needs to pull the trigger.



Comme vous pouvez voir, les membre de la CSSA continue a faire bouger des article pour faire iliminer l enrigistrement des arme longue.

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Fighting the firearms public relations war
TwitterEmailMatt Gurney, National Post · Oct. 7, 2011 | Last Updated: Oct. 7, 2011 4:03 AM ET

The last several years have seen a radical shift in fortune for Canada's long-beleaguered lawful firearms owners. The election of a Conservative majority last spring has all-but assured us that the widely disparaged long-gun registry will be scrapped. In Ontario, even the banhappy McGuinty Liberals made a campaign pledge not to replace it with a provincial program. And a new Canadian study, soon to be released, statistically supports what millions of Canadians have long believed intuitively: The gun registry has never saved lives and was always a misused political prop for the federal Liberal party.

New data from the United States, while emerging from a very different and more dangerous gun culture, is still good news for those Canadians who want stronger legal protections for citizens who use firearms in self-defence: Over the past decade, after handgun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C. were struck down as unconstitutional, violent crime rates in both cities fell sharply - and disproportionately, compared to the national average.

Yet there remains much to be done to rationalize Canada's politically skewed firearms laws. As Lorne Gunter wrote in Wednesday's National Post, the "safe storage" provisions for firearms and ammunition under the Firearms Act are vaguely worded messes, often sloppily enforced by law enforcement. This has led many to justifiably wonder if the purpose of these provisions is less to prevent the theft of firearms than to give police and Crown attorneys "catch-all" charges to levy against law-abiding firearms owners who have acted in good faith, but in some way fell afoul of the regulatory state. These laws make it extremely difficult for Canadians to use their legally owned firearms for self-defence in case of home invasions.

The arbitrary classification of firearms into three categories also needs reform. While the difference between a single-shot shotgun and an assault rifle should indeed be recognized by the law, many of the classifications of firearms were determined more by how scary a panel of bureaucrats thought the gun looked, rather than any realistic assessment of its risk in the hands of a violent criminal.

In other words, there's much to be done and Canada's well-organized firearms-owning community will continue to pressure their elected officials in Ottawa to make sure it happens. But that's going to take more than just phone calls and letters to local MPs. It means that Canada's firearms owners must continue to always act in good faith and with discipline - every misstep made by any of them will be used to tar the whole community.

This will almost certainly prove to be the case with the tragedy that recently unfolded in Jaffray, B.C. On June 16, a group of children and teenagers gathered in the home of George Lewis Phillips. During the social gathering, at which no adults were present, a 12-year-old child, the stepson of Phillips, had what police have described as "unimpeded" access to a loaded shotgun. The boy brought out the firearm, without threatening intent, to show it to the guests in the home. The shotgun was accidentally discharged. Michael Voth, 17, was instantly killed. Police have laid charges of criminal negligence causing death and unsafe storage of a firearm against Phillips (his unidentified stepson is too young to be criminally charged).

In announcing that the Crown would be laying charges, RCMP Corporal Chris Faulkner correctly noted that this incident is a tragedy for all concerned. "A 17-yearold is dead. We have an immediate family that is still grieving and suffering. We have the [child] who, I'm sure, feels a ton of remorse. We have the stepfather of the child, who must feel terrible the situation unfolded that way," he told reporters.

Whatever the admitted and serious flaws of the Firearm Act's safe storage provisions may be, it is never - under any circumstances - acceptable for a young boy to have unimpeded access to a powerful, loaded weapon. The death of young Voth and the legal troubles now facing Phillips are a painful reminder of the tragic toll that firearms can take if not safely stored and used. On a political level, they also serve as a reminder to Canada's lawful firearms owners: The last few years have brought much good news, but winning the war of public opinion requires each of you to do your duty to ensure that gun ownership in Canada remains safe, law-abiding and always rooted in common sense.

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Matt Gurney: Ontario wouldn’t join Quebec in creating its own gun registry
Comments Email Twitter Matt Gurney Sep 29, 2011 – 8:20 AM ET | Last Updated: Sep 29, 2011 10:12 AM ET

In July, Quebec’s Public Safety Minister Robert Dutil told reporters that his government was considering a “Plan B” in the (highly probable) event that the federal Tories scrapped the long-gun registry — the creation of a provincial registry. The Supreme Court has already ruled that firearms registration is a federal responsibility due to the public safety nature of gun control, but Quebec could theoretically try to establish a registry for firearms that treats them as simple property, no different than dogs, cats or boats. It would be a political stunt only … but then again, that’s all the registry has been since the beginning: A costly act of political theatre in which politicians impose burdensome red tape on lawful firearms owners and proclaim society somehow safer as a result.

An open question in July was whether or not Quebec would open the floodgates to similar moves by other provinces. Of particular interest was Ontario. Current Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, a Liberal, has been outspoken in his support for stronger gun control measures, including keeping the long-gun registry and even imposing a total handgun ban (handguns are already banned for most, but certain exemptions exist for collectors and sports-shooters who pass more stringent safety courses and background checks).

The ongoing Ontario election campaign has seen the provincial Tories beating on the tough-on-crime drums with proposals for GPS monitoring for sex offenders, work gangs and publishing the sex offender registry. It was certainly possible that the Liberals would attempt to turn the tables on the Tories by coming out strongly in favour of a provincial long-gun registry and calling the Tim Hudak-led Progressive Conservatives “soft on guns.”

Yet that apparently will not be the case. The Liberals haven’t made gun control a campaign issue. It only surfaced after a Tory candidate declared in a press release that Mr. McGuinty would indeed be likely to enact an Ontario firearms registry. Gerry Labelle, Progressive Conservative candidate for Sudbury, posted his release to the website of The Sudbury Star, in a section of the paper’s website freely open to the community (the local Liberal incumbent, Rick Bartolucci, also posts his press releases there, and the paper hosts the releases without endorsing their content).

In his release, Labelle wrote, “McGuinty, a staunch supporter of the long gun registry would likely introduce a provincial gun registry … It is ridiculous that Dalton [McGuinty] and Rick [Bartolucci] would actually believe this measure is wanted by the Ontario resident. … This is yet another example of how the provincial Liberals have lost touch with the needs of Sudbury residents.”

Unfortunately, nothing in Labelle’s release makes clear exactly why he believes Mr. McGuinty would be “likely” to introduce an Ontario long-gun registry (except, of course, for his publicly known pro-gun-control positions). Contacted for comment, a senior member of the McGuinty campaign said that, “While the Conservatives and the NDP conspired to kill [the long-gun registry], it only works as a national initiative and we won’t be doing it provincially.” I was also sent a statement made by the Premier before the campaign began, where he expressed disappointment that the long-gun registry would be scrapped, but added, “My preference is if we’re going to have a program of any kind that it be run and administered at the national level.”

It’s not clear exactly how the Tories and NDP “conspired” to kill the registry — it will be the majority Conservative government that kills it, likely without support, and they were never exactly secretive about their desire to do so. But it’s still good news for law-abiding firearms owners everywhere. Given the legal challenges to the creation of a provincial registry, and the decision of the Ontario Liberals to pass on the opportunity to establish one if re-elected, the odds of a series of small registries popping up across the land would appear to have gotten a lot longer.

National Post

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