Report says million guns not registered

More than a million guns remain unregistered in Canada, 18 months after a registration deadline, a document released by the Canada Firearms Centre confirms. The total number of valid firearm licence holders who still haven't registered a gun stands at a whopping 406,834.

The document, released yesterday, shows 620,000 firearms remain to be re-registered and there are more than 78,000 applications to register or re-register caught in processing or a backlog of the Firearms Information System.

Before anyone should seriously consider supporting a gun registration plan, they should consider what to do when people don't register by the hundreds of thousands. Remember, not registering a gun that you own, in Canada, is a crime. We're talking a massive civil-disobedience effort here. And it's not like you can just arrest the people who show up to protest.

Do you send police out to search the homes of people with valid licenses but without a registration? What do you do when the people catch on -- and shoot back? Because, even in Canada, if you try door-to-door confiscation you are likely to provoke people enough to do that.

Pushing gun confiscation schemes in the US amounts to pushing for civil war. You might be able to convince 51 Senators, 218 Representatives, and 5 Justices, but the people you really have to convince are the people with the guns. And that's just not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

If you can't convince them, and you won't leave them alone, you'll have to kill them. That's what gun prohibition boils down to: killing people who are overwhelmingly law-abiding, honest citizens because they disagree with your social policy.

That's why America was founded a Republic; so that the rights of minorities would be protected from abuse. Because that protection is necessary to peaceful cohabitation.

No one should doubt the consequences of a confiscation policy. Just look at Canada's response to a registration policy: 400,000 people engaging in civil disobedience.