Registration

There were Canadian elections recently.  The party that has ruled for years lost to a Conservative coalition, and some representatives are talking about closing the Canadian firearms registry. 

Money quotes:

The Conservatives have called the registry a waste of taxpayers money that targets duck hunters rather than criminals.  There are no cost estimates on campaign promises such as defending victims' rights and improving gun safety.

The sooner, the better, I say.

Here in Canada, members of the Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association (CUFOA) have been publicly demonstrating against the Firearms Act for over eighteen months. Various CUFOA members were arrested from time to time, but the government always dropped the charges. They apparently had no stomach for seeing the Firearms Act challenged in court.

Bruce Montague, a CUFOA member and one of the more vocal opponents of the Firearms Act, was arrested while attending a Dryden, Ontario, gun show with his daughter.

That he was arrested is not overly surprising. The Area Firearms Officer knows all about Bruce and does not like him or his flaunting the law so flagrantly.

What is surprising is the way this case has been handled. After all, Bruce had been openly asking the government to charge him for ages. He would have gladly taken Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers on a tour of his home and showed them where the unregistered firearms were.

Instead they dragged Bruce away to jail, left his 12-year old daughter Katie alone in the Dryden gun show. Donna Montague, Bruce's wife, only found out about the arrest because a friendly vendor called Donna to let her know what had happened, and that Katie was with him. The OPP apparently couldn't be bothered to let anyone know they had abandoned the 12-year old child after arresting her father.

By way of The Smallest Minority comes this horrifying tale of police abuse for a paper crime: failing to register a firearm. Go read the whole thing. There's a legal defense fund for the case, and they could sure use some donations; lawyers are expensive.

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.

According to State Attorney's Office records, 70 of Jacksonville's 92 homicides last year involved a gun, and 34 of this year's 51 homicides were tied to a firearm. At the Sheriff's Office, records were compiled in electronic, microfilm and 3-by-5-inch index card versions and listed a gun's serial number, weapon type and description, caliber and registration date. Also listed was the owner's name, race, gender and date of birth.

I wonder if this violates the Privacy Act? More importantly... I wonder exactly what the police were planning on doing with this database? Registration has already been established as completely useful in a crime-fighting context (even when you include a ballistic "fingerprint" along with the registration). The only things registration data can be useful for are harassment and confiscation. So, officer, exactly what were you planning to do with that data?

A Conservative government would scrap the federal gun registry and divert the savings to hire 200 more Mounties and pay for a sex-offender registry. Leader Stephen Harper said Tuesday nixing the registry would save between $25 million and $100 million a year in maintenance costs.

Remember when the gun registry would only cost $2 million? Good luck, guys -- maybe you can bring Canada back from the brink.

The Martin government is letting slip tantalizing hints that it might do something about Canada's $1-billion gun registry. We are told that this has nothing to do with the election expected on June 28. Still, we can't help but note that if there were a political dimension to this, we would be seeing just what we are seeing now: acknowledgement of a problem but no specifics of a solution. Any precise step might cost votes.

Something certainly has to be done about the registry. The government's own estimates show that the cost of this thing, first estimated at $2 million, will reach $1 billion by next year and could climb past $2 billion within the next few years. To date, about 7 million firearms have been registered, leaving an estimated 1 million unaccounted for.

Ignoring the election-year issue (campaign promises are rarely fulfilled), it's obvious to me that Canada has wasted a lot of time and money trying create a list of the people in their country using their guns properly. It seems to me that it would be much more productive to try to come up with a list of people using their guns improperly. However, this sort of promise could, if believed, sway a lot of people.

The federal firearms office said yesterday it had "no knowledge and no records" of a mystery $150,000 "firearms" communications contract that is the subject of fraud charges against sponsorship program head Chuck Guité and Montreal ad executive Jean Brault.

It is the second suspicious sponsorship contract to be tied to the controversial gun control program. Another $330,000 advertising contract ? previously criticized by the federal auditor-general ? is also the subject of fraud charges laid yesterday.

The RCMP, in announcing six counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud against Guité and Brault, allege the two men "defrauded the federal government for $150,000 within the ambit of a contract with respect to the surveillance of interest groups and with respect to the registration of firearms."

Gee, Canada's firearm registration program is broken. No surprise there. But what's this about surveillance of interest groups?!

Canada's gun registry does not work, according to Dr. Gary Mauser, a Simon Fraser University professor. He spoke Saturday in Saskatoon at a conference organized by the Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association (CUFOA). "We have spent $2 billion on licensing and registering guns in Canada and it has not decreased violent crime and suicide," Mauser said.

Just one more piece of evidence. You can't affect the behavior of criminals by regulating honest folk -- at least not for the better.

Commissioner Newell puts pawn records in that category. They've been used to solve crimes, and no one has abused such lists to "harass" gun owners. What would we say to victims, he asked, "if we could have kept records to solve the crime but didn't?" Rep. Domino and his fellow legislators need to think about that question before voting on those gun bills when the session starts.

No one has abused such lists to harass gun owners... yet.

An 18-year-old can vote, but he cannot obtain his own Firearm Owner's Identification card.

State Rep. Brandon Phelps, D-Norris City, said that does not make sense. Phelps is proposing two "simple" changes to the FOID card laws that include reducing the age at which a person can apply for a card from 21 to 18.

"I just don't believe it makes any sense that we can send our women and men to Iraq and then they come home and they can't get their own FOID card," Phelps said about a change he's targeting with House Bill 3989. "They're old enough to vote. We're not changing the laws on how old you have to be to buy a handgun."

This is a small but positive step forward on gun rights -- and gun rights is an area that sees precious few positive steps even in these times.

A STATEWIDE audit of firearms has reached the Mid-North Coast. Local police are cracking down on gun ownership and over the next few months every firearm licensee will be asked to prove they are allowed have weapons in their home. There are thousands of registered names on the Mid-North Coast Local Area Command firearms database and every single person will be visited and questioned by police. If their licences don't match the registered guns in their homes then they will be penalised.

"It is effective in accounting for where firearms are," said Port Macquarie licensing sergeant Senior Constable John Lawrie. "Obviously people detected with unsafe storage or who are unlicensed will face action."

It will take months to account for every person and every registered firearm on the police database, but the local area command will not stop the audit until it does. "The reason they are doing it is because they did a pistol audit last year in reaction to firearm incidents in Sydney and it was so successful we are doing all firearms now," Snr Const Lawrie said.

Remember, once the government assumes permission to register your firearms, they will also assume permission to "audit" your "registration" in order to charge with you crimes like "unsafe storage" or "not having a gun you registered" or "having a gun you did not register". This is something they will apparantly devote lots of time to doing... time they could have spent chasing people actually committing crimes.

Of all the laws enacted or proposed over the years to curb gun violence, the most sensible and arguably the most effective is the Brady Act, named for the White House press spokesman who was seriously wounded in the 1981 gun assault on then-President Reagan.

During its 10-year life, the law has blocked hundreds of thousands of gun sales to people barred by law from owning firearms -- felons, domestic abusers, mentally defective persons and those under court restraining orders.

The fact is, the Brady law (which provides for a background check on retail gun sales) will not successfully prevent any criminal from obtaining a firearm. It can only prevent criminals from obtaining firearms through a retail sales channel at best, and that's assuming the criminal is unwilling or unable to obtain a fake ID and use that to make the purchase. Criminals have an extensive black market in which they can acquire firearms.

The Brady law seems sure to survive. But a measure that has already passed the House and is now before the Senate could weaken it, by forcing the destruction of records of gun sales within 24 hours of purchase. The current holding period is 90 days, which allows the FBI time to cross-check for illicit sales. A survey last year by the General Accounting Office turned up 228 transactions during a six-month period that should have been blocked but were not.

Sponsors of the measure, and the Justice Department, say that reducing the holding period to 24 hours would protect the privacy of law-abiding people.

But not all gun buyers are law-abiding. And why should they have more privacy rights than people registering cars or dogs or holding a library card?

228 transactions, over 6 months, out of millions of transactions per year. Think about that. And while you do, remember that the 24 hour period applies to gun sales that are given the go-ahead -- that is, gun sales to law-abiding citizens. If the transaction is denied or delayed it can be retained. But once the check has come back clean, the sale can go forward legally -- and the records should be destroyed, rather than used as a de-facto gun registry.

And a "gun registry" is the correct term. Firearms are not like library books; they are not loaned out and then returned. They are purchased and then retained by the buyer. The appropriate analogy would be a Federal government registry that kept, for 90 days, a record of all the books each person had bought -- and occasionally went back to reclaim books that the purchaser wasn't "allowed" to have. Do you think that policy would survive First Amendment review? If not, why should the identical policy survive Second Amendment review?

Apparantly, someone thinks Canada's gun registry is actually working...

Quoted By most standards, Canada's gun-control program is a success: More than 2 million firearm owners (90 per cent) are now licensed and almost 7 million firearms (85 per cent) are registered. More than 9,000 people have been denied firearm licences under the new program.

OK, let's see here. 2 million firearm owners registered, with a totally made up 90%. That leaves 10% "known" unregistered firearm owners -- about 200,000 people. And how many unregistered firearms? 7 million registered, estimated 85% coverage... leaving about 1 million unregistered firearms. This is after 2 years and at least two missed deadlines. The people who haven't registered by now aren't going to. And the criminals never were going to, and their ranks are probably not counted in those official estimates.

All this at a cost of nearly $1 billion (Canadian), which is at least a 5x cost overrun from estimates of 200 million. And given the hideous mess the system was in for the first couple years, who knows how accurate those records are?

But this is a success because 9,000 people have been denied firearm licenses under the new program? Hmm. 2 million owners and not even 10,000 denials. How do you know those who had their applications denied did not simply go and acquire one of the 1 million unregistered firearms? That's right -- you don't. In fact, you don't even know that their firearms were collected and taken away. They just don't have the legal piece of paper that says the gun is registered.

Personally, though, I don't consider any program a success just because it signs people up. There needs to be a measurable effect on the problems you're trying to solve -- in this case, crime rates.

Quoted Police officers use the system more than 1,500 times a day and report many cases where the system has allowed them to remove guns from people who were a risk to themselves or others. Canada's laws do not prevent people from using firearms responsibly, but they do increase accountability.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is straight out of Minority Report. Canada's police agencies have officially implemented the doctrine of precrime. If you look at a police officer the wrong way, or spit on a Mounties' mount, then they'll take your guns away and count it a crime prevented and a success of the program.

Would it be impolite to ask what has happened to Canada's crime rates? Any change? Hmm?

Quoted Because of the virulent opposition of the gun lobby, the firearms program has been subjected to a burden of proof absent from other public-policy debates. Nevertheless, the facts, when accurately reported, speak for themselves. Firearm death, robbery and injury rates are the lowest they've been for more than 30 years. While it is too early to assess the impact of the licensing and registration system, the results are encouraging, particularly where rifles and shotguns are concerned.

Ah, here we go. Straight out of "How to Lie with Statistics", we have the attempt to redefine terms in a manner that supports your argument. Suddenly, it's not crime that's important: it's firearm death, robbery, and injury rates. When you start taking away firearms, obviously you reduce the rate of firearm-related crime. But what about overall rates? Strangely silent on those.

This journalist at least has the decency to admit that it's too soon to assess the impact of the program... right after implying that the program is responsible for those 30-year lows in firearm crime. Not to be outdone, she immediately follows up by assessing the impact of the program as "encouraging". Impressive intellectual rigor there.

Quoted Public-interest test: Police, public-health officials and groups representing victims of violence continue to support the law. According to the last Environics poll, three-quarters of Canadians continue to support licensing gun owners and registering guns, despite the controversy. In Quebec, the levels of support are the highest in the country - 85 per cent. While it is true only 45 per cent of gun owners support the legislation, 77 per cent of people living with gun owners support it.

Let's rephrase this with something a bit more illustrative. Let's replace the term "gun owners" with "Jews" and the term "gun" with "Torah" (which is, I think, what Christians would call the books of the Old Testament; but I am no expert on Judaism). Go ahead and read the quoted paragraph again, making those substitutions.

If that doesn't make my point clear, nothing will, so you might as well stop reading here.

Quoted Role-of-government test: Governments have a duty to protect their citizens from harm and to regulate dangerous products. The United Nation's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has said countries that fail to protect their citizens adequately from firearms through effective regulation might be failing their obligations under international Human Rights Law.

In Canada, governments may have a "duty" to protect their citizens from harm (they do not in the US), but they certainly don't have the ability. It's unclear if the author hasn't thought it through or just doesn't realize that not everyone lives within 30 seconds of a police station.

As for regulating dangerous products, firearms (when used properly) are remarkably safe... for the user. They tend not to be safe for people on the wrong end of the barrel, but that is, as they say in software development, "A feature, not a bug." In any case, it's hard to equate "firearms safety regulation" with "nationwide registration scheme", because the firearm doesn't get any safer once the government knows it exists.

And claiming that lack of a firearms registration system might run afoul of human rights laws is ... well... laughable. Or would be, if she wasn't serious.

Quoted Value-for-money-test: The introduction of the new program has required significant investment to address gaps identified in the old system. In spite of the rhetoric, two-thirds of the money was spent on screening and licensing gun owners, not on registering guns.

So it's a good value to spend two-thirds of a billion dollars to identify under 10,000 "precrime" suspects? Interesting math there.

Quoted Under the old system, firearm owners required firearms acquisition certificates (FACs) only to acquire firearms, not to own them. Only a third of gun owners had valid FACs and only handguns were registered. Now all firearms owners must be licensed and all firearms registered. Police have immediate, on-line access to information, which is essential to taking preventative action.

Betcha thought I was kidding about the precrime stuff, huh?

Quoted The old system cost approximately $30 million a year to operate. The new system will cost $70 million a year, but public-safety experts maintain it is a good investment. The costs of firearm injuries and deaths have been estimated at $6.6 billion a year, more than $1.5 billion in Quebec alone.

How exactly will either system reduce those costs? Firearm injuries and deaths can be divided into several categories:

1. Accidents
2. Crimes
3. Suicides

Will the criminals stop committing crimes because they would have to register their firearm? Not likely. Will the people who legally own firearms, registered or otherwise, injure themselves at a lower rate now that the government knows they have firearms? Unlikely. Will people who plan on committing suicide balk at registering a gun to do it -- or simply choose another method, perhaps even a gun they have already owned? Doubt it.

So we have a system that costs $70 million per year. Even taking that at face value rather than multiplying it by 5, is it worth that much to buy absolutely no reduction in the $6.6 billion price tag? You would be better off spending the money buying firearms for the poor in high-crime neighborhoods -- then you might actually see a reduction in crime!

Quoted Efficiency (and effectiveness) test: Concerns about management and efficiency issues have been addressed over the past year. And as important as efficiency is, effectiveness is a critical issue. The preliminary evidence is strong Canada's approach to gun control is contributing to public safety. The rate of homicides involving firearms continues to decline in Canada, from 0.8 per 100,000 in 1989 to 0.48 per 100,000 in 2002. The overall homicide rate has also fallen, from 2.41 per 100,000 in 1989 to 1.85 per 100,000 in 2002 - but not as quickly as the firearms homicide rate.

Here, we have a couple points to make. First, note the switcheroo -- suddenly we're talking about "firearm" rates rather than overall crime rates. It helps make up better numbers, don'tchaknow. Second, the "preliminary evidence" is in regards to a program which you just admitted earlier is "too soon to assess". But you love to assess it when you can handwave the results! And, of course, let's not miss the fact that (in the US at least, and presumably in Canada) the period around 1990 was a very high crime period, and around 2002 was a very low crime period. Assuming Canadian crime rates followed the same trend, what proof do we have that any firearms registration program had any effect whatsoever?

Quoted The most dramatic decline has been in homicides involving rifles and shotguns. In 1989, 218 Canadians were murdered with firearms, compared with 149 in 2002. While murders with handguns have increased slightly (owing largely to problems with smuggled guns), murders with rifles and shotguns have plummeted, from 131 in 1989 to 32 in 2002. In 1989, 74 women were murdered with guns; in 2001 that number was 32.

More statistics, and more ways to lie with them. Note that the absolute numbers of homicides are compared between 1989 and 2002, without regard to changes in population. Note that we're talking about "firearm" homicides. And then we get to the kicker; murders with handguns have increased! Remember, under the "old system" (if I understand correctly), only handguns were registered, and under the new system they added rifles and shotguns. So, even though firearm homicides fell, crimes committed with the type of weapon that was now being registered increased. Crowing about the reduction in rifle and shotgun murders is meaningless when the registration programs for those firearms did not even begin until the end of the sample period.

Oh, and what is with the special line-item for "women"? Are murders of women somehow more evil?

Quoted Affordability test: It's difficult to measure the benefits of prevention programs, until it is too late. More than 1,000 people die every year in Canada as a result of guns, compared with 3,000 killed in automobile crashes. The costs of Canada's firearms program are dwarfed by the money governments invest in trying to keep our highways and roads safe. The government spent almost half a billion dollars to widen a New Brunswick highway after 43 people died over five years. Over the same period, more than 5,000 Canadians were killed with guns. The question is not can we afford to license gun owners and register guns, but can we afford not to.

The missing element in this analysis is what effect licensing gun owners and registering guns will have on the costs being cited. Unfortunately for the author, there is reasonable way to postulate reduced costs from licensing and registration of gun owners and their firearms. Money spent on those programs will have no practical return.

Quoted Wendy Cukier is a professor of information-technology management and of justice studies at Ryerson University in Toronto and co-founder and president of the Coalition for Gun Control.

I'm ashamed to admit that anyone teaching information technology could make such a poorly-reasoned analysis. But I think the other half of her title explains much about this article.

Background checks on gun buyers would be retained for just 24 hours, instead of the current 90 days, under a deal Republicans struck during final negotiations over an immense spending bill funding dozens of federal agencies.

Wait a minute... under current law all retention of records is illegal, right? You mean the FBI has been illegally retaining records all this time.. and you expect another law to stop them?

The NSW Government is facing a staff revolt at its police firearms registry amid fears the database containing records of the state's 200,000 gun owners and their million-plus firearms has been corrupted.

There are also growing concerns about the collection of data, and evidence that as much as 60 per cent of the database is inaccurate, according to Shooters Party MP John Tingle.

60% accuracy? That's about how well the BATF does with machine guns. And if your records are wrong you can be charged with a crime. Sounds peachy!

The N.W.T.'s justice minister says aboriginal hunters in the territory shouldn't be worried about Canada's new gun laws while out shooting this fall.

'The RCMP has agreed not to prosecute anyone'? Roger Allen Roger Allen says he's been told the RCMP don't plan to charge anyone using unregistered firearms for hunting purposes.

If you aren't going to enforce a law, either repeal it or refuse to pass the damn thing in the first place. Selective prosecution just dilutes respect for the law in general.