And you don't have to be paranoid to know that you should not accept the police's opinion as truth, and in fact, what you are complaining as the police's opinion is not, I've heard that large numbers of rank-and-file policemen oppose the registry. You are talking about statements made by a few police chiefs and a few organizations.

You don't have to be Einstein to know that not all homicides happen in Toronto. A lot of times, smaller cities end up having some drunken domestic dispute suddenly go awry. If I were a cop, I would like some indication before entering a situation that there may be a weapon on the premises. Does the registry do this? Again, the report would seem to indicate that it does. Is it worth the cost per year? I don't know. But I am willing to try and learn more before blindly opposing something just because it was a Liberal policy. But that's just me… again I have that annoying habit of trying to learn things before making a judgment.

And by the way, I am well aware of why search and seizure and other police powers are limited. I am also well aware that the police are not some band of fascist thugs that are out to get us all, just barely held at bay. I hear that some are real people who are doing a difficult job, often with little to no help or thanks from an increasingly paranoid public who think they are out to get them.

Then again, I try to live a life that is not ruled by broad sweeping generalizations that have little to no basis in reality. It's quite nice really… it means that I don't live in a constant state of fear and anger. It even allows for a sense of humour, and sometimes lets me recognize sarcasm. Maybe some day you can give it a try when the roving bands of angry police stop hunting you.

I'm glad that I don't live in the literalist metaphor-free world that you live in. It's widely known that powers of search and seizure and other police powers are limited for a reason.

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.

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.

That said, anecdotal evidence I have had (basically talking to a few off-duty cops a few times… far from scientific, but it's all I got!) says that even the incomplete knowledge the registry gives is better than nothing, and knowing ahead of time that a rifle was on the premises HAS changed how some officers approached a seemingly routine situation such as a domestic dispute that quickly got out of hand. But that's anecdotal evidence which is about as useful as cherry-picked statistics when trying to reach a well formed opinion.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's difficult for us in the general public to form a solid opinion on this topic, given we just don't have solid information. Everything that I have seen or heard on this is a slanted and filtered sliver of the bigger picture. I can see both sides of the debate, and I think the report that PVL is going to table today would have been useful to MPs voting on the bill, but that ship has sailed.

I find that police will tell you anything you give them is useful. They'd have us all under house arrest if they could, it would make their jobs easier.

I'm just glad I don't live in the police state you seem to live in…

I'm skeptical. For one thing, any search for any information in their computer systems automatically triggers a search of the registry, so search statistics are extremely misleading. Secondly, I cannot possible imagine that police officers change their behaviour based on information in the registry, which is not complete and which tells you nothing about where a gun happens to go after it is registered, and tells you nothing about unregistered guns.

I find that police will tell you anything you give them is useful. They'd have us all under house arrest if they could, it would make their jobs easier. The police will say they like to scour this information about us, but in reality does it actually help them to investigate, to make arrests, to make us safer? I seriously doubt it. They have so few anecdotes about the registry leading to anything positive, they reuse the same ones over and over again.

who cares?

But I have looked up the article in question (thanks jolyjon!), I can actually provide answers: yes, no, not mentioned, unknown, unknown. Which is really my point- the stat itself is far too specific to provide any useful analysis, let alone reach any great conclusion.

But I dug a bit deeper, and got a few points that would invalidate the conclusion. The stat in the article mentions the increase of gun related crimes since 2002, but this increase is in gang-related homicides, which (while a serious problem itself) has nothing to do with the long gun registry. Further digging shows that gun homicides that are not gang related have been pretty much stable since the mid 90's. I can't really find any information that would support or deny the usefulness of the registry with regards to stopping crime, but the RCMP report does seem to imply that it is a useful tool to the police. Whether it's worth the cost, I really don't know.

My cats aren't registered, and I am not required to register them with the Federal government, nor with any other jurisdiction. I suppose if the Liberals were in power they might consider it though.

I know a man who has about 10 old cars parked on his farm. Only two of his vehicles are registered with the Provincial government. Those are the ones that he uses on public roads. If the Federal government told him to register all of his vehicles he would be rightly miffed.

Your analogy breaks down. Try again.

Why don't you make yourself useful and post the answers to these questions?

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?

I am law/order person so I am sympathetic to police most of the time.

What makes me suspicious about registry though is that police don't seem to mention how many crimes the registry has solved. The police tell us how many times they use registry but they rarely, if ever, say that it solved 42 (or whatever) crimes last year and that's why we need it. If it was such a vital tool to solving crimes we would know about it.

You have claimed that criminals do not register their weapons. I am saying many "criminals" don't become criminals until they use a weapon, assault, whatever. I suspect many "registered" weapons are used in crimes. I may be wrong.

But overall – I do not really see the value of the registry.

Anyway, since all legal gun owners have a federal firearms licence – information police officers have always and will continue to have access to – is enough to make a police officer take extra caution in such a situation. The firearm registry, which was and never could be as accurate as the licencing information, is not nearly as useful. For example, I have a firearms licence, and I own several firearms that are registered to me, however I have lent one of these firearms to my friend who also has a firearms licence but doesn't personally own any guns. Do you think that if the cops responded to a domestic dispute at his home they would be any less careful because the registry shows he doesn't have any firearms, but he does have a licence? I don't think so. Regardless it is not people like myself or my friend who are a threat to the police or anyone in the first place…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a logical argument? Not so much.

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.

Where did you get that statistic? Is it a real one or the type used by 85% of the population to convince 17% of blog readers that 43% of statistics are made up?

I have not seen any specific gun homicide stats so I'll have to take your word on this, but I do have some questions: are these lumping all gun homicides together as one? Is there a comparison of handgun vs. long-barrel vs. automatic weapon homicides? How does the trend of gun homicides compare to the rate of non-gun homicides over the same period? What was the trend prior to 2002?

Or to put this another way- are you making your assessment of the trends based on a legitimate understanding of all the information, or are you confusing correlation and causation? Taking one statistic and extrapolating from that is a dangerous way to form opinions. For example, http://www.cbc.ca%2Fcanada%2Fcalgary%2Fstory%2F2009%2F10... target=”_blank”> tiger attacks in Canada have skyrocketed since the GST was lowered to 5%. Obviously this cut is a menace to public safety… I demand an inquisition!

So what went wrong?