The Chrétien government has taken its share of lumps over the federal gun registry — particularly since Auditor General Sheila Fraser announced in December that her office had identified huge cost overruns that will bring the cost of the registry to close to a billion dollars.

While the Liberals’ continuing mismanagement of public resources annoys me as much as the next person (OK, probably more than the next person), I think it is unfair to assign them total blame for the cost overruns. Clearly, complete intransigence by the provinces, delaying tactics and avoidance by gun owners, and other unforeseen turns of events had much to do with the increase in costs (in fact, advocates have been quite explicit in stating their desire to drive up the costs of the registry). Moreover, the cost alone is not sufficient justification for ending a program that is based on a sound principle, just when it is beginning to work. After all, the bulk of the money has already been spent; why not let it do some good, rather than “scrapping the registry” as everyone from Ralph Klein to Bob Runciman have called on the federal government to do.

Quite often, arguments about the gun registry tend to stray off topic, with both sides labeling their opponents as something that they are not. Opponents of the registry are painted as violence-prone gun fanatics, when only a small proportion of them are. At the same time, advocates of gun registration are vilified as urban snobs who want to confiscate every gun in the country. Neither side appears to hear (or care) what the other side is saying.

The case for firearms registration continues to be compelling. While politicians and advocates on both sides argue about cost and compliance, I think it’s worthwhile to consider some of the following points:

  • A study by Neil Boyd, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, has concluded that “there is more evidence to support the effectiveness of gun control measures than most other legislative interventions. For example, Canada has always had stricter gun laws than the United States, particularly with respect to handguns. As a result, Canada has roughly one million handguns while the United States has more than seventy-six million. The costs of firearms death and injury in the two countries have been estimated to be $495 (US) per resident in the United States compared to $195 per resident in Canada.”
  • Every year, over 17,500 prohibition orders are issued that include restrictions on gun possession. According to the Canadian Firearms Centre, “as of October 2001, over 4,000 licences have been refused or revoked by public safety officials and there have been thirty-two times more licenses being revoked than the total for the last five years of the old program.”
  • The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police estimates that the gun registry is already being accessed an average of 2,600 times a day. They provide numerous examples where it has assisted police in solving crimes and identifying suspects.
  • The Canadian Police Association (representing rank and file police officers) argues that “registration increases accountability of firearms owners by linking the firearm to the owner. This encourages owners to abide by safe storage laws, and compels owners to report firearm thefts where storage may have been a contributing factor”.
  • A 1991 Angus Reid survey found that “half of the firearms in Canadian households have not been used in the past year”. Firearms registration has and will encourage people who no longer use or need their weapons to get rid of them. Fewer guns lying around will lead to fewer successful suicides, fewer gun accidents, and fewer gun thefts.
  • Because we live next door to the United States, our gun control laws may appear strict, but they are very much in line with those of the rest of the world. In fact, a 1997 resolution of the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice called on all countries to adopt licensing a registration requirements for all firearms.

Many critics of the legislation are still refusing to comply, including high profile gun enthusiasts such as Tory leadership candidate Peter Mackay. Several of them have taken unregistered firearms to public protests in order to invite arrest. They claim that they want “a test case” so that they can have the law struck down. Instead, the first charge under the new legislation was laid against a Mississauga man, who left an illegal gun where his seven-year-old sister found it and fatally shot their six-year-old brother. Somehow, I don’t think this was the test case that firearms advocates were looking for. What it was, however, was an excellent reminder of why we needed the legislation in the first place.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...