Goodbye and good riddance to long gun registry

Toronto Sun ^ | 2011-11-06 | Connie Woodcock

[Clive]

One sunny afternoon in early fall, a bunch of my neighbours were standing around watching a sick raccoon die on somebody’s front lawn.

In the old pre-gun registry days, someone would have gone home, got a shotgun or .22 and put the poor creature out of its misery.

But, as one said to me, his gun wasn’t registered and he didn’t want to be seen with it. Someone might call the cops or a cruiser might happen by.

That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with the gun registry: It makes criminals out of perfectly ordinary people doing nothing wrong, while it makes near-criminals out of those who have registered.

And, in the eyes of Canada’s urban elites, Neanderthals out of all of them.

There’s a good reason why the long gun registry’s supporters still don’t get why it needs to end, with its data destroyed.

It’s simple: Their names aren’t on it.

If your name was on a list that made you look like the next thing to a criminal, you’d want it destroyed, too.

And if your name isn’t on that list and you’re one of the hundreds of thousands who refused to register your weapon, making you a criminal waiting to be caught, you’d want it destroyed so in case some future government decides to reinstate it, your absence isn’t noticed.

Thanks to the Conservative majority the registry’s days are finally numbered, but right to the bitter end the whining continues.

Even as federal legislation to end it passed second reading in the Commons 156-123 (with two Northern Ontario New Democrats voting with the government) and went to committee last week, the registry’s defenders were still at it.

The debate was so toxic, you’d think this argument had just started.

New Democrat MP Jack Harris said the government is making it easier for “dangerous firearms to fall into the wrong hands.”

How, exactly, we’ll never know. He didn’t say.

“When people get up on their feet and they say that no crimes have been prevented by the registry, that is just absolute crap,” Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae told reporters. “Lives have been saved.”

Which lives, he didn’t mention. They never do.

And so it dragged on – the same old tired arguments, the same old empty rhetoric backed by no evidence at all.

There was even one last new argument dragged through Parliament: Destroying the data itself is somehow wrong.

Archivists claim it will set “a dangerous precedent.”

How? By preserving information that was wrongly collected in the first place and is known to be full of errors and omissions? Meanwhile, Quebec wants to use the data to establish its own long gun registry.

The fact remains after all these years, there is still no evidence the long gun registry has prevented one death.

It would not have prevented the infamous Montreal massacre at l’Ecole Polytechnique to which it was a response.

It didn’t stop the Dawson College incident. That weapon was registered.

A similar registry did nothing to prevent the mass slaughter in Norway earlier this year.

Urban elites may mourn its loss but they’re still as wrong as ever. If you can’t understand what’s wrong with it, perhaps you won’t get it when government cuts back your freedom of speech, or bans your favourite food, or controls you in some other way.

You don’t miss a freedom until it’s gone, and then it’s usually too late.

For people like me, of course, the gun registry has been the gift that keeps on giving, providing column after column for years.

In that sense, I’m going to miss it.

[Eska]

Vast majority of used guns I have seen bought and sold are done without papers; I don't think too many people are actually worried of what you speak.

I am glad they are doing away with records in Canada just the same.

[packrat35]

What was the final cost of that debacle? Last figures I heard was 1.5 BILLION.