John Geddes

John Geddes writes on politics and policy, with occasional reporting and comment on arts and culture.

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How police use the gun registry

by John Geddes on Thursday, April 2, 2009 12:47pm - 177 Comments

How police use the gun registry Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to try for a third time to scrap the gun registry has been cast by Conservatives as a cultural question, a matter of understanding rural Canada, in particular the way folks outside the big cities use their rifles and shotguns.

But there’s another gap of understanding that I would argue is more important in getting a handle on this debate: grasping how police use the gun registry. If there’s a case for keeping the registry, it must rest on how useful the database is to police, especially when a cop has to venture into a potentially dangerous situation.

So I asked the RCMP, who were made responsible for the Canadian Firearms Program back in 2006, and they provided up-to-date statistics. In 2008, police across Canada used their computer systems, often terminals right in their patrol cars, to pull information from the Canadian Firearms Registry On-line over 9,400 times a day.

That adds up to a staggering 3,438,729 queries from police officers last year. It’s hard to imagine a federal database more intensively mined.

I asked a veteran officer in an informal conversation to explain how the system is typically used. He said a cop called to domestic dispute will routinely conduct a quick computer check to see if there is a licensed gun owner at that address, and find out exactly what guns are registered there.

It’s not hard to imagine how discovering that a resident owns a single hunting rifle might suggest one thing to an officer; finding out the man causing the disturbance possesses several exotic weapons would indicate something else again.

Police also use the registry to conduct so-called reverse checks; in cases where they recover a gun, perhaps from a crime scene, they check on who is the registered owner. Those in favour of scrapping the so-called long gun registry make a point of stressing that, even without it, police would still be able to check out who has a licence to own guns. But that wouldn’t be any help when the cops are working to trace the ownership of a specific firearm that turns up in an investigation.

A few statistics help round out the picture of how the online data is used. Police most often plug a name into the system to find out if that person is a licenced gun owner and what registered guns the individual owns. They made that sort of query more than 2 million times last year, so often that this has obviously become very basic step in Canadian police work.

The next most common sort of data search involves checking to see if guns are associated with a certain address. Police made address queries more than 900,000 in 2008. They checked serial numbers on firearms 74,103 times. They also, less frequently, search for data by entering company names or telephone numbers of potential gun owners.

Is it possible that police have fallen into the habit of using this system so very often for no good reason? I don’t think so. Millions of data searches must turn up thousands of pieces of useful information. So, in considering the bill introduced yesterday in the Senate to eliminate the gun registry, you must balance the loss of information police evidently want to have, and make a point of obtaining millions of times a year, against the benefit of relieving honest gun owners of the minor inconvenience and expense of registering.

In his March 21 speech to the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, Harper spoke of this debate in terms of an urban-rural divide. “The leaders of the opposition parties continue to be against this,” he said. “But there are MPs in all these parties that know what we know, that law-abiding hunters and farmers are not part of the crime problem.”

The Prime Minister is tapping something deeply felt here. Where I grew up in Northwestern Ontario, most households had guns and I’m sure most hunters these days still resent having to register them. (They don’t like filling out their income tax returns, either, or affixing the little renewal sticker to the corner of their licence plates, but they’ve gotten used to it.)

For my sins, I’ve lived in cities for a long time now and drunk my share of low-fat lattes. My recollection of the general perspective of the hunters I’ve known, though, is that they tend to respect police, and I doubt they would really begrudge cops a tool that gives them a little extra information, maybe a bit of an edge, when they’re walking into, let’s say, a kitchen where a depressed drunk has been smashing up the cupboards.

You want to know if that guy has a gun.

The following tables show police access to the Canadian Firearms Registry On-line (CFRO), for 2008 (by quarter).

The table below shows CFRO access, by province/territory for 2008.

Query Count	2008 Q 1	2008 Q 2	2008 Q 3	2008 Q 4	Total
Ontario	379,279	430,465	444,901	428,171	1,682,816
British Columbia	182,170	210,880	224,330	208,153	825,533
Alberta	76,911	84,380	88,691	80,381	330,363
Quebec	31,438	38,004	37,132	42,345	148,919
New Brunswick	30,137	35,840	34,768	31,208	131,953
Manitoba	21,727	27,424	24,446	21,717	95,314
Nova Scotia	18,451	19,808	19,978	18,910	77,147
Newfoundland and Labrador	13,825	17,310	18,972	16,085	66,192
Saskatchewan	23,992	18,057	3,240	3,438	48,727
Northwest Territories	3,416	3,436	2,655	5,027	14,534
Yukon	2,391	2,748	2,704	1,273	9,116
Prince Edward Island	1,865	2,118	2,038	2,093	8,114
Nunavut	-	-	1	-	1
All Locations	785,602	890,470	903,856	858,801	3,438,729

More by John Geddes

Chris

When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, they immediately began massive search and seizures of firearms to further neutralize their political opponents. The Gestapo later established a system of central registration of persons obtaining firearms. Hitler’s gun control and disarming of the population almost completely guaranteed that firearms were in the possession of Nazi supporters and sympathizers and made any kind of armed resistance inside Germany next to impossible. Hitler said, “The most foolish mistake we would possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquers who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”
John

The registry did not prevent a law abiding gun owner from a strip search near Barrie – even though his guns were registered, and he was legally shooting ground hogs with the permission of the land owner. Why was this travesty not prevented ?. If the police had checked the registry – which one would have assumed they did – why would it be possible for loaded police shotguns to be pointed at the mans wife and kids ?. Talk about police out of control. No point to the registry – it was not used- or was it ?
Mikael C.

“finding out the man causing the disturbance possesses several exotic weapons would indicate something else again.” Really? It sounds more like you think exotic gun owners or gun collectors are a different category of user, which I dont think is fair.
http://mmcewan@inetlinkwireless.ca M McEwan

This story and the photo is a gross misrepresentation of the facts and implies that the author is either misinformed or intentionally trying to deceive. Let’s deal with the misleading photo to start with. Not one weapon in that photo falls under the Long Gun Registry. They are all either Restricted or illegal firearms and have been since 1934 and will continue to be even after the proposed changes.

The other misleading part of this article is that no changes are planned to the Canadian Firearms Registry as inferred in this article, only the Long Gun Registry portion of it. Another misleading part of this article is the domestic dispute analogy. A police officer under the proposed changes will still know if a person residing at a residence has been issued a Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL) which is the only way one can legally acquire a long gun. So the officer will know when answering a domestic dispute that there is a possibility that firearms may be in play which is exactly what the officer needs to know. What type of long gun it may be is really immaterial. Would the police officers react differently if it the rifle in question were a 1948 .303 Enfield than they would if it were a Remington 410? The answer is no.

The last misleading part of this article is the omission of the fact that the Long Gun Registry launched by the Liberals was supposed to cost $88M (later increased to $119M) to set up and then be financially self sustaining. To date it has cost over $2B (Yes BILLION) and continues to bleed money at a rate $125M per year. This does not include the estimated $1B in additional costs to other agencies that resulted from it (from the AG Report). After this huge investment we have a registry that is hopelessly ineffective. It just does not work and never has. This fact alone puts the lives of police officers at risk everyday.

As a former law enforcement officer I can tell you that we just don’t trust the system when we are dealing with long guns and always approach a situation assuming that there are weapons involved until we can ascertain that they are not. We do that because we know that the Long Gun Registry is a joke. We don’t need any statistics to tell us that because we just relate our own personnel experience to it. For instance, as a police officer I always want to comply with the law, even if I disagree with it. So I have been trying to register two long guns now since the registry opened in mid 1990s with no success. I keep getting letters from them asking me to re-new but they have weapons listed on them that are not mine and never were. I fill out the paperwork with the corrected info only to receive another letter months later asking for the same thing.

Here is what the AG and Senior Police Officers says about the registry:

1. AG Report – Police only use it during major operations and then only 74% say it is effective;
2. AG Report – The program does not collect data to analyze the effectiveness of the gun registry in meeting its stated goal of improving public safety. The Centre does not show how these activities help minimize risks to public safety with evidence-based outcomes such as reduced deaths, injuries and threats from firearms.
3. OPP and former City of T.O Commissioner Julian Fantino is opposed to the gun registry, stating in a press release:
“We have an ongoing gun crisis including firearms-related homicides lately in Toronto, and a law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them. None of the guns we know to have been used were registered, although we believe that more than half of them were smuggled into Canada from the United States. The firearms registry is long on philosophy and short on practical results considering the money could be more effectively used for security against terrorism as well as a host of other public safety initiatives.”
4. Edgar MacLeod, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police states that:
“while the cost of the registry had become an embarrassment, the program works and provides a valuable service. In a typical domestic violence situation, he says, investigating police officers rely on the registry to determine if guns are present. Onboard computers in police cruisers, or a call to central dispatch, alerts officers to any firearms registered to occupants of the house.” (as I have already stated the elimination of the Long Gun Registry will still allow officers to access the info that they need).
5. John Hicks, an Orillia-area computer consultant, and webmaster for the Canada Firearms Centre, has said that anyone with a home computer could have easily accessed names, addresses and detailed shopping lists (including make, model and serial number) of registered guns belonging to licensed firearms owners. Hicks told the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) that “During my tenure as the CFC webmaster I duly informed management that the website that interfaced to the firearms registry was flawed. It took some $15 million to develop and I broke inside into it within 30 minutes.” I can tell you that there is a large volume of evidence that shows that these hackers are highly organized and are using the info to steal guns from homes that are later used to commit crimes.
The last problem with the Canadian Long Gun Registry is not in Canada, it is in the U.S. where the mess that our system is in is used by the NRA as an example of why a registry will not work there.
madeyoulook

It’s not hard to imagine how discovering that a resident owns a single hunting rifle might suggest one thing to an officer; finding out the man causing the disturbance possesses several exotic weapons would indicate something else again.

And it is life-threateningly stupid to imagine that the ABSENCE of information in that quick query means something else again. The very fact that criminals will not be registering their guns means that any cop approaching a situation, reassured that the database clears that address, needs retraining pronto.
Ronald

The statistics in this Macleans article are nothing new. Neither are the comments in favour of maintaining the universal gun registry. The problem is the statistics and comments do not stand up to critical inquiry. When is the media going to give real investigative journalism on the issue instead of this pap?

Face it. There is an automatic hit on the registry for any type of police inquiry no matter how mundane. Why do police at all levels and services condemn the long gun registry if it is so useful? This author does not claim it has solved any crimes. Nor can they. No thinking policeman would stake his life on a gun registry that is incomplete and fraught with errors. The Liberals never could explain the millions of missing firearms that were not registered.

Criminals do not register firearms. The statistical chance of being shot with a registered firearm is probably less than 2% going by published crime stats and it shrinks to a fraction of 1% if we consider handguns? The obvious conclusion is the registry is expensive without demonstrable gains to public safety. What it does do though is put the burden on law abiding Canadians and limit their historic cultural rights for no good reason. Anti-gun rhetoric is soft on any real science and like this article is easily countered.. What Canadians don’t need is more of an expensive failed program. We also need more honesty in our media. The facts are readily available so it is all the more disturbing when we read an article that has an obvious political bias while at the same time telling half-truths. Shame on Macleans!
Sixth nations Taxpayer

Your arguments are all tired and bogus. No matter how you pathetically attempt to spin it, the vast majority of gun crimes are commited with unregistered weapons. Also, in order to own a firearm a person must have an ownership permit. Once again you city lefties who are afraid of your own shadow piously believe yours is the path to righteousness. If there were other people armed in the Birmingham New York situation there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the casualties. Therefore, that makes you and people like you complicite in those murders. No matter how you try you just aren’t gonna get the Pollyanna world you long for.
Luke f

Gun Lobbyist propaganda “Criminals don’t register their guns and isn’t that the group were trying to disarm?”

Ya Right,
According to the RCMP -Firearm program website: Firearm licences revoked by year.
2005- 2,233- 2006- 2,093- 2007- 1701-2008 – 1800

The majority of these people probably had their firearms registered and later had their firearm licence revoked because some of them were deemed to be a threat to public saftey. “NOTE: Reasons why firearms licences revoked include: a history of violence, mental illness, potential risk to himself/herself or others, unsafe firearm use and storage, drug offences, and providing false information.”

These people who had their firearm licence revoked and owned firearms must now legally transfer their firearms. If the firearms are not registered how would the authorities know how many firearms these people need to legally transfer? If the firearms aren’t registered these people if they want can sell them to anybody and it would be extremly difficult to trace the firearm back to the original owner. A registration certificate identifies a firearm and links the firearm to its owner to provide a means of tracking the firearm.

From the RCMP websit:
Registration helps police trace firearms and combat the illegal movement of firearms
To break up organized networks involved in the illegal movement of firearms, it is necessary to have a traceable commodity. Previously, police had to search manually through thousands of retail records to find the source of any non-restricted firearms recovered at crime scenes. The computerized, centralized CFIS makes it much easier for police to trace and locate the last known owner of these firearms. If firearms are identified as stolen, knowing the source of the firearm will give the police a valuable starting point for their investigation and identify possible patterns of theft from firearm shipments or dealers.

Licensing and Registration
The law assists police in taking preventive measures such as removing guns from domestic violence situations. The licensing system reduces the chances that those who are a threat to themselves or others will get access to firearms. The fully integrated databases ensure that when an incident occurs involving a licensed gun owner, authorities are alerted and may take action to remove the firearms and/or revoke the licence. Without a firearm registry, the police would have to take the word of the occupant whether firearms are present.
http://www.dsgl.org AJMD

In a free country, the police are given permission by their employer, the citizens, to have certain firearms, certain ammunition, and use them within specified guidelines which may be stricter than the ordinary laws on self-defense. The police would have to document where the weapons are stored, and so on. On the other hand, the citizens would be under NO restrictions, and would not be given ‘permission’ by police, or have to divulge to police, what firearms they own or carry, excepting if they were themselves under legitimate investigation regarding a particular crime. A situation where arbitrary ‘rules’ are set for gun ownership because of ‘potential’ criminal activity startes a chain of events where the end point is often total firearms prohibition, and a violent, unstable society. If the police and government would not POTENTIALLY abuse such a registration system, it would be perhaps tolerable, but the reality is that they almost always DO abuse it. In contrast, the citizens labeled as ‘potential’ criminals by such systems RARELY abuse their firearms rights, so the system is more dangerous than useful, in the long run.

Ronald

Well put. Totalitarian states have historically started with ‘firearms registration’ that proved to be a prelude to confiscation. The same pattern is being followed in Canada by the Liberal Party of Canada. They promised that registration would not lead to confiscation. BUT immediately over 50% of handguns were listed as prohibited and the Liberals are on record as intending to ban not only the remaining legal handguns but legally registered semi-automatic firearms as well. I expect that prohibition will include pump action firearms as it has in other jurisdictions. So much for the honesty of the Liberal Party. It would seem private property rights run a poor second in the grab for urban votes. We will have taken another step on the road to a police state with NO demonstrable improvement in public safety.
http://twitter.com/ChromeSushi ChromeSushi

Don't forget that the Liberals also want to brainwash you with the H1N1 vaccine and fluoride in the water.

Ronald

Media can approach a story in two ways. Firstly, information is collected, analyzed fairly and conclusions reached. The second method is to start with a conclusion in mind, collect selective data that supports the conclusion and then write the story. Our Macleans author seems to have chosen the second route. Typically, large scary statistics are quoted and used to justify the conclusion. Numerous readers have already questioned the quoted large figures and justifiable so. These gross figures have been quoted in past anti-gun articles and have been discredited for being misleading half-truths. Given the fact that the science is against them does not discourage the anti-gun lobby from repeating the lie. It is an historical fact that a lie told often enough takes on a false mantle of truth.

The gun registry will never be reliable and only a fool would trust their life to it. The reasons for this statement are irrefutable. Millions of firearms are missing from the registry by the Liberal government’s own admission. There are many errors in the registry, also admitted. Criminal sourced firearms which are about 98% of all firearms involved in crime are not registered. So for two billion dollars we have a registry that has not solved one crime or made society safer. What the Liberals did do though was to attack private property and demonise legal firearms owners in the Liberals quest for urban votes. Shame on them and those that pimp their propaganda.

Many Canadians now recognise, along with police at every level and service, that the universal gun registry has failed to deliver any of the promised results. Worse still the Liberal Party has chosen to represent only urban constituents on this issue. That two billion dollars could have been better spent in other areas especially in this time of fiscal crisis. How can we trust political parties that only promote more of failed programs as their offering for the future? We certainly don’t want to follow the U.K. and other failed programs. Look at the British situation for yourself and see how failed programs result in lies and deception. It happened there and we see a similar trend here with the Liberals and their approach to gun control.

All of this could have been written about but it would not have served this articles conclusions.
Dave

It seems that the major impact of the gun registry is that it makes guns harder to get and keep.

Sounds effective to me. With fewer guns overall the harder and more expensive it is for the bad
guys to get them – they still get ‘em for sure – but it’s less than it would be otherwise. The basic stats are simple – the higher the rate of gun ownership, the higher the gun death rate. USA has 35 % of households with guns and in 1999 about 10 gun deaths per year per 100K folks. At the same time Canada had 17% of households with guns, and about 2 gun deaths per yr per 100K folks. Other country’s stats bear this out. It’s a direct correlation – fewer guns = fewer gun deaths.

Thomas Zychowski

Where do you get your statistics, incorrect.

Manny

I want to add my voice to the chorus complaining about your choice of picture to illustrate this article. Shame to your photo editor!
http://twitter.com/ChromeSushi ChromeSushi

I come from a family of gun owners and have alway supported the registry. This is why, and please explain if I am wrong. Conservatives tend to make the argument that bad guys won't register guns so you're punishing good guys. But if a cop arrests someone for minor assault, or busts a crack house and finds that these bad guys have unregistered guns couldn't they lay additional charges? I know the registry won't stop a bad guy from shooting someone, but I've always thought the value would be in being able to figure out who the bad guys are before they shoot someone.
CONCERNED

If the police are so interested in prosecuting criminals by keeping things like the gun registry up to date, why is the 'Canadian Police Information Centre' itself so out of date and backlogged that it can not provide up to date information to prosecutors when they proceed with criminal prosecutions? you should read the article in "Law Times" April 19,2010 page one to understand the consequences of this failure. In February 2009 at the trial of one Horne the police still had not entered 11 conviction and sentencing decisions relating to HORNE which in turn affected the procedure followed by the prosecutor.
lost faith in gov't

how many more billions of dollars are we the taxpayers to blindly give up to pay for a needless system. the majority of firearms that are used in crimes are illegal ( smuggled in from USA) restricted/prohibitted. typical photos of firearms in crime related news are not hunting rifles or shotguns. the registry as a gun control tool has failed. it isn't the registered firearms of the average person that is used in most crimes. if port authorities and border crossings guards did their jobs as well as the gov'ts would like you to beleive we wouldn't need to burn these billions of tax dollars on a method of gun crime control that has not worked. and yes the registry could be used against firearm owners to seize all known firearms in the event of some (RED DAWN) scenario. i beleive we should have the right to protect our self, family, property in the event of a possible unwelcome scenario. I also would welcome the NRA into canada as one national voice to speak for it's members and assist in protecting our privilages.
Gerald L

As a parent and gun owner, I spent several years with each of my three boys bird hunting and deer hunting. All of the hunting was done while they were minors and hunting under my supervision. However, once they turned 18 years of age, I became a criminal for letting them use my guns to come and hunt with me. They also became criminals for not having a possession / acquisition permit. All three boys have their hunter safety, but due to college fees, and billons other priorities at this time in their life, they are not interested in taking a further firearms course, and dish out further expenses for permits. We are loosing a complete generation of sportsmen, or making a bunch of good citizens into criminals. Further, the long gun registry has cost billions of dollars that should rather be used to pursue real criminals, and provide protection to those who are living in danger of physical abuse,and violence. I'd like to hear just one story where the long gun registry actually prevented a criminal from carrying out his crime sprees.
Kevin

The last line of the article says it all…… " You want to know if that guy has a gun"……. the entire article is flawed.

Law Enforcement needs to approach any "unknown" situation with extreme caution and be prepared for the worst.
If they are looking to the registry to make an absolute determination whether someone is armed and actually alter their approach to a situation based on it, they are potentially putting their lives and the lives of others in jeopardy…..

A database simply WILL NOT provide those answers or any added level of safety. Possession of firearms is dynamic and changes by the minute, by both criminals and law-abiding citizens alike. A database does nothing in determining if someone is armed.

Let's not forget, the same drunken person can inflict serious injury and even death with a common kitchen knife if he/she is so inclined.

Let's put the responsibility on the individuals and make the punishment fit the crime, not on society as a whole…..