Last spring, just after Prime Minister Stephen Harper revived scrapping the gun registry as a Conservative priority, I tried to find out how useful the registry is to police.
What I found out then seems relevant right now given this evening’s vote in the House to get rid of the federal system for keeping track of who owns rifles and shotguns.
The RCMP, who were made responsible for the Canadian Firearms Program back in 2006, told me that police across Canada used their computer systems, often terminals right in their patrol cars, to pull information from the Canadian Firearms Registry over 9,400 times a day last year.
If you’re interested in more details, I talked to officers and broke down the statistics for this posting. By the way, more details on the functioning of the registry provided by the RCMP in an unreleased report are being held back by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan, according to this news story.
When I reported last spring on the staggering 3,438,729 times police officers used the registry last year, many critics of the registry told me those numbers are meaningless. Among other things, they said criminals don’t register their guns, so the police are wasting their time when they check the system.
But police officers I spoke with said they occasionally learn that a gun might be in the home where they are responding to a domestic dispute, or at an address where there’s just been a robbery. It’s really not hard to imagine why they’d like to know what only the registry can tell them.
So let’s assume that the registry is of at least some use to police. The question, then, is whether it’s of enough use to warrant the cost of the registry to taxpayers and the inconvenience it represents to gun owners.
On those two points, I’d make these observations. A friend who just registered his deer-hunting rifle, and who doesn’t like the registry, admits registering was no real problem. And the Auditor-General figures getting rid of the long-gun registry will save about $3 million a year.
In other words, I’m told the inconvenience is minimal and the ongoing cost marginal. If that’s true, why deny police the registry even if it’s not all that potent a crime-fighting tool?
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I don't see why the gun registry was necessary, but now that it exists and costs next to nothing to upkeep (seriously, $3 million is chump change: about 10 cents a year. By comparison, I'm paying $1 / poppy and I lose 'em) it's just irrational to get rid of it.
My brother's a police officer and frankly anything that can alert him and his colleagues to the presence of a gun in a house is a good thing in my books. I'm sure they are cautious anyway — for one thing, in certain areas every house has a rifle — but there actually is a difference between uncertainty (= caution) and certain knowledge, if only in that the latter is marginally less nerve-wracking (at least for the police officer's family). It certainly doesn't hurt that police officers be given as much information as possible; believe me, we can trust them not to get cocky if a name doesn't show up on the list of registered gun owners. These guys are professionals and they don't take unnecessary risks. Nor should we ask them too simply because we've watched too many Charlton Heston speeches on YouTube.
It does not follow that because career criminals are not apt to register their gun that therefore registered guns are innocuous. From what I can gather, most dangerous situations arise not from career criminals making a last stand or lunatics gunning for the police, but rather from alcohol abuse by ordinary people. Sure, most interactions the police have with the public are with the same law-breaking 10% of the population, but there is a difference between those 10% and a genuinely murderous criminal. Yet those 10%, or even the remaining 90% (the generally law-abiding part of the population), also have the potential to misuse guns; and the misuse of guns is potentially lethal for everyone involved.
Finally, there is no repeat no conspiracy to take away people's long guns.
Your brother's search of the registry can never lead to certain knowledge, even if one (two? three?) weapons turn up on the query. What will NEVER turn up on that hit will be any non-registered weapon.
Furthermore, it does not follow, since (as you say) registered guns are not innocuous, that maintaining the registry renders them any more so.
I thank him for that on a regular basis, if not in so many words. It's a very honourable profession. I'll pass along your tip of the hat. Incidentally, my having a brother who's a constable doesn't make me any better informed on this stuff, as my brother is a model of discretion and modesty. What we need in this debate is the honest, albeit perhaps anonymous voices of actual police officers.
To address your points:
a) "search of the registry can never lead to certain knowledge"
Yes, it can. If a search reveals gun ownership, that is fairly certain knowledge that a gun is on the scene, if the incident is taking place at the gun owner's home (as I bet 90% of them do). If a search does not reveal gun ownership, that is not certain knowledge one way or the other. It does not follow that, because some queries turn up nothing useful, those queries that do turn up something useful are useless.
b) "What will NEVER turn up on that hit will be any non-registered weapon."
Right. But, as I said above, I think we can trust the police not to get all reckless when they find no gun registered. As they do this kind of thing on a regular basis, they are not keen to play the odds and assume no record equals no gun.
c) "it does not follow, since (as you say) registered guns are not innocuous, that maintaining the registry renders them any more so."
You mean it is of no use to police to know that there is definitely a gun in the house they are dealing with? That's like saying it's of no use to snorkelers to know that there is definitely a shark in the shark-friendly environment they are about to explore. I would guess, though of course I hardly know, that it would make their jobs easier to know more about what they're dealing with.
(a) No, the certain knowledge is never there, because it can never get better than "AT LEAST such-and-such weapon MAY be on the premises." To prepare specifically for a certain weapon just because that's the one that happens to be blinking on the screen back in the cruiser strikes me as a potentially tragic attitude.
(b) repeats my point in (a).
(c) No, you mistake my meaning. Those weapons are deadly whether registered or not. So is the pit bull, that may or may not be registered. So is the bread knife, the crossbow, the axe, the meat cleaver…
I don't get the whole "well we've spent the money, so we might as well keep it" argument. We already know that the operating costs annually for this database (even is use the figures most favorable to the registry) are greater than the total cost of this registry were supposed to be. I myself am not so charitable, and assume that the costs will continue to escalate. If it can lose the vast amount of money in the past seven years that it has, I don't see why it couldn't lose the same amount of money in the next seven. Particularly since we were told seven years ago that the money was largely "already spent".
If it wasn't for ideology of "we can't give in to the rednecks" perhaps the gun registry would have been killed earlier when the first cost overruns happened (ie. when it started costing more than 10 million dollars rather than the 2 million estimated). Then it could have been reintroduced with different people in charge and different expectations of what could be accomplished. I do not believe that a budget of 2 million could balloon to 2 billion without gross incompetence, horrible mismanagement, and a fair bit of corruption.
Mostly though, I'm serious about the fact that this money should be spent on intervention programs for youths at risk for gang activity (rural, reserve and urban) and for greater intervention and better management of domestic violence. These are programs that are proven to work, and require a lot more money. If that 2 billion was invested there, there would probably be thousands that would be productive rather than incarcerated and hundreds of people would be alive today.
Instead we threw the money away on a database that even if it functioned well, would have no discernible effect on gun crime. So we threw away a huge amount of money for the sake of a culture war talking point, and because people were fanatics about it, they've lost opportunity to create a long gun registry for decades to come.
All of you who are outraged made it easy to kill by insisting that the gun registry should not be questioned and allowed it to gallop away into one of the greatest boondoggles in Canadian history.
Intervention programs do apparently work, and may be a better allocation of resources. However, we're dealing with an ideology in this current government that is not interested in programs that reduce crime – they are solely interested in appearing to be 'tough on crime.'
It's interesting how the conservative posters on this site are so willing to parse the cost-benefit balance of the gun registry, yet nobody – gun-nut or normal person – has proposed a cost-benefit of the Cons 'get tough on crime' charade.
That's fine – it's not about reducing crime or saving lives or making the cops' job easier. If it doesn't have that get tough look to it then these guys in Ottawa aren't interested.
The Cons should go ahead, tell the cops that they waster their time 10,000 times a day looking up stuff on the website. Tell them that they don;'t know what they're doing, that it'll all be solved with mandatory minimums and longer sentences. Someday a competent government will be back in Ottawa, leaving the Cons to wail their ideologies in the wind.
Yeah, locking people up alone is indeed more expensive than programs like we are talking about.
As well, if the gun registry is something that is indeed useful, doubters like me would have had a lot less traction if it had cost 50 million dollars (25x the projected initial cost) and had stabilized at a reasonable operating cost for a database. The fact that we kept throwing money at something that didn't work, leads me to believe that liberal ideologies that are wailing in the wind are to blame, rather than carefully thought out and examined civic policy.
Do you think the registry would still be an issue today, if it had been operating like it was promised 10 years ago? No, it would have been a settled victory for supporters of the gun registry.
Well the registry works horribly. My mother inherited a bunch of firearms a couple of years ago. She didn't have a license herself and not all the guns were registered to begin with and had an extremely difficult time simply getting a consistent response from Miramichi to her questions about to properly cross all the t's and dot the i's. We all got the impression of system poorly run.
But I don't think 'liberal ideologies' are at fault, Rather, liberal ideolgies such as that that conceived the registry recognize the it is but one tool and part of a mutlifacetted approach to reduce crime and create safer communities. No less than the police themselves agree.
But conservative idealogues and the gun-nut lobby fought this one tool tooth and nail, and, coupled with a poorly implemented and prroly run regustry, here we are now.
Even if the "gun nuts" as you call them were completely uncooperative, it should have made little difference to getting the system up and running. Once it was up and running, and running efficiently, people eventually would have wandered in to get their guns registered. Most gun owners wouldn't want the hassle of worrying about whether or not they are in compliance with the law, because they have homes, businesses, and families to worry about. In fact, I'm pretty sure that though the gun registry was wildly unpopular, you did largely see compliance by the public.
However, the absolute refusal for people to admit that the registration system was perhaps not feasible or cost effective, or needed to be killed and started over, was completely for ideological reasons. Yesterday they reaped the reward for their stubborness.
I'd argue that as a society, we no longer condone having a few drinks and driving home afterward. Unless, of course, you've not been paying attention to any of the medical or social media campaigns out there and still perceive driving drunk as a sport.
Where I grew up, abusing one's privileges meant you could get them revoked. That includes the privilege of driving, the privilege of owning a gun, and the privilege of having a domestic pet. They're not rights, they're privileges, where people have the opportunity to use them well or abuse them. Where they abuse them, charges can, and often should, be laid.
If we leave the registration of long-guns out of an overall registry, abuse of the privilege of gun ownership is a viable and potentially legal option for those gun owners, regardless of their intent today. Registration is intended to be further incentive to stay on the straight and narrow.
Lots of front-line officers are ambivalent about the registry – it serves to confirm what they already assume in any situation. But it does, from time to time, provide them with useful information. And insofar as that is the case, I believe the cost of keeping the registry on the books is worth it.
In re-reading your post, I overlooked at first your comment regarding the registry as a further incentive to "stay on the straight and narrow". I disagree. While I agree that loss of privilege is a deterrent, registration of said firearms does not act as more of a deterrent. I have had a firearms license of one form or another since I was 16. I own(ed) long gun of many types as well as a few handguns over the years. My handguns were registered to me as well as permits to convey them to the gun club to target practice. the registration did nothing to convince me to be "on the straight and narrow", rather it was to potential loss of privilege that kept me on the path of legality. Handguns have been registered since 1935. Did the handgun violence drop in that time, no. Registration does not work. Real penalties for misuse as well as resources to investigate and intercept and prevent abuse is a much better solution.
John, I will say pretty much the same thing I said back in April, those statistics are very revealing about police procedure, not the utility of the firearms registry. How so? You will note that the number of registry accesses is quite similar for Quebedc and New Brunswick (QC 149 K, NB 132 K). Of course Quebec has eight times the population of NB. Either there is overuse of the registry in NB, a pronounced underuse of the registry in QC, or the numbers have nothing to do gun safety and instead reflect the procedures of individual police agencies. My bet is number three. (Of course NB could be inherently more dangerous than other parts of Canada with daily shoot-outs on every corner. I'll check that out the next time I cross the street in Saint John.)
My feelings about the long-gun registry really haven't changed since 1995. If its such a great crime fighting tool we should keep it, but finance from police department budgets (say charging them each time they make aan access request). If that won't cover the costs, kill it. My gut feeling has always been that the police chiefs of Canada can always find more useful things to do with their budgets, useful in terms of actrually fighting crime.
Update: Went to lunch. No one took a shot at me. Thank you gun registry!
I would just like to point out that the $3 million figure that Mr. Geddes has in his article is a complete fabrication.
This quote is factually incorrect, as referenced in the May 2006 update on the Firearms Registry by the Auditor General. The $3 million figure is not attributed anywhere in any document from the Auditor General's Office
Please see the report itself:
(http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oa...
The $3 million figure is attributed from a Coalition for Gun Control press release – dated April 1st, 2009 to RCMP Deputy Commissioner Peter Martin
"The RCMP estimate, that if the registration of rifles and shotguns were discontinued, it would save only $3 million per year. (RCMP Deputy Commissioner Peter Martin testimony to the Government Operations and Estimates Committee, November, 2006.)" (http://www.guncontrol.ca/English/Home/Releases/pr...
However upon review on the Parliament's Government Operations and Estimate Committee records (minutes and evidence), Mr Martin was not a scheduled speaker for any committee meeting in November 2006
(Please review http://www2.parl.gc.ca/CommitteeBusiness/Committe...
Because it's NOT nuts to expect criminals to register their weapons?
Or because you also do not expect criminals to register their weapons? And that somehow means it's NOT nuts to track only non-criminal weapons?
Good point. Congratulations. Now stop yer whining and register your guns.
Gun owers will STILL be required to be licenced, and renew those licences every five years. It is therefore STILL possible to find out if a licenced gun owner lives at a given address. That' s just as good as finding out if he has three guns or five guns or ten. The most dangerous ones, of course, will continue to possess guns without licencing.
criminals with guns versus criminals with a gun registry.
who cares?
So my nervous 90 year old aunt hears a noise in the night and calls 9-1-1 and gives her address to the dispatcher. An automated hit on the Canadian Firearms Registry results. 3.5 million hits in a year suddenly doesn't look like such a big number when we realize how those hits are generated, and "how very, very often".
Even if the firearms registry is axed, the other provisions of the current firearms legislation will survive, including licensing of individuals to own OR BORROW a firearm. That rightly puts the emphasis where it belongs.
Wendy Cukier, her objective was “To ban all guns” that was what she wanted to do, that was her objective. Can you imagine, the only people with guns are the criminals/police/soldiers…
ok, if she can elimate “all” guns in the world, great, but their always be a power hungry madman with a stash of weapons wanting to take over.
She cost us a lot of money,
She is “very” quiet right now. all her Liberal cronies have been disgraced (allan rock) and are long gone.
iver since this registry came in to effect, gun crime has gone “up” 28%,
it is very sad we let a person like that do this much damage.
anyway, she is done like xmas dinner, her research is very flawed, and all it did was get us further in the hole.
All of my guns are registered and I had no problems doing so. The disturbing part about all of it is that the whole system can be toppled in one generation. If gun owners become annoyed by continuing changes of rules and regulations ( it is already happening ) all they have to do is make sure their spouses and children never get there possession and aquisition licenses. In the event of the gun owner"s death,if those guns can't be found who are they going to go after? Another problem is that alot of unregistered guns are being given or sold because of the hassle of ownership to individuals who collect guns. Point is would you rather have a gun in most homes or hundreds in a few? I'm not kidding I have seen a few personal collections of that size in our area. You tell me what is better especially if someone decides to steal that collection.
I am a gun owner. I have owned a gun for several years. I had to obtain an FAC firearms acquisition certificate, from the police who did a criminal records check, and then put it on file. This would show up beside my name if I was entered into the computer by police, stating that I am a possible firearms owner….I have an FAC…….The only difference now is the firearm registry lets them know what kind of firearm I own….Well guess what, who cares, Do you really think it matters. We are paying how much for the police to know what kind of gun I own, what a joke. The police are going to proceed the same whether i have a 20 guage or a 12 guage, what the heck is the difference..They would have known that I was a gun owner before this whole regestry thing started…………………what a waste……………lol it's expensively funny….not
I tend to agree with the faults of the registry, including cost overruns and poor management, etc. I do not agree that it should be scrapped, as it is part of a broader public safety strategy. I also think that gutting it is ideological pandering of the worst kind and (especially from a government that pretends to want to reduce crime), and counterproductive to law enforcement activities.