There are worse ways to waste a billion

Friday, January 10, 2003

On the Web site of the Law-Abiding Unregistered Firearms Association, the organization devoted to urging gun owners not to abide by the law requiring them to register their firearms, there is a stirring quotation, intended to convey the seriousness of the issue. You may have seen it before. It begins: "First, they came for the communists ..." I have tried, God knows how I've tried, to get worked up about this gun registry business. But try as I might, I have not been able to convince myself, as LUFA might have it, that this is exactly how Hitler started. I have not even been able to rouse myself to the level of zeal -- less hysterical, though no less fervent -- displayed by my colleagues in the space above, who in the last month or so have written no fewer than nine editorials on the subject.

It isn't that I don't share many of their criticisms of the registry. There's no doubt that it was largely superfluous: Though many people appear to believe that gun control began in Canada the day Bill C-68 became law, the critics are right to point out that handguns have been restricted since 1934, that purchases of ordinary firearms -- hunting rifles and the like - - have required a licence since the early 1970s, and that a registry of each was already in existence long before the Liberals came to power.

Moreover, the Mulroney government had just imposed a battery of new regulations, covering everything from the training and certification of gun owners to the storage of firearms and ammunition.

So the only real effect of the Liberal legislation was to extend the existing obligation to register to those who already owned a rifle and had purchased it before 1970. This was certainly unnecessary -- the people to whom it applies would mostly be senior citizens by now, and a rifle is hardly the thing to knock over a 7-Eleven with in any event -- and probably ineffective: As the critics never tire of reminding us, the people most likely to comply with the gun law are those least likely to commit crimes. Which helps explain why gun crimes are up 13% since C-68 came into effect.

And of course, there's the cost. I might quibble with claims that the gun registry is "500 times" over budget -- the original $2-million figure was a net estimate, $119-million in costs minus $117-million in anticipated revenue, and while it is true that the cost of the registry is now projected to net out at more than $1-billion, that is on the basis of a mere ten-fold increase in costs. But there is no need to exaggerate what is clearly a stellar example of bureaucratic bungling, even without the additional costs imposed by the refusal of six provinces to participate, or the footdragging and outright sabotage by rebel gun owners.

So: unnecessary, ineffective, probably unworkable, and outrageously expensive. But at the risk of insouciance, what else is new? This government wastes a billion dollars every other week. I mean that literally: You could go through the current public accounts and find $26-billion in unnecessary, ineffective and probably unworkable programs on your lunch break. What's so special about this particular outbreak of foolishness?

Moreover, some of the criticisms of the registry cancel each other out.

If it is unnecessary, because most guns are already registered, it cannot also be the massive new intrusion it is painted to be. The obligation to register their firearms that provokes aging farmers to such wrath is one that has long been familiar to hundreds of thousands of other gun owners. And if it is likely to do little to reduce crime, on the "guns don't kill people, people with guns do" principle, the same could presumably be said of the regulations that existed before C-68. Should we repeal those, too?

Don't get me wrong. It was a mistake to have ever entered into this morass, a mistake of which the government was given ample warning.

It was predictable, and predicted, that compliance would be patchy, and that the costs would be huge. And whatever effect gun control has on crime, it was probably captured by the existing regime. So the gun registry was always of dubious benefit, especially set against the cost.

But, well, it can't hurt. It may not help much, but it's hard to see how registering guns would lead to more crime, except among those "law- abiding" LUFA members. Maybe the money shouldn't have been spent.

But it has been. So what possible use is there in scrapping the registry, as this newspaper and the leader of the Opposition have advised, now that it has been compiled? True, many gun owners have yet to register their guns, notwithstanding the Jan. 1 deadline. But many more have, or have declared their intent to do so. More than 2 million gun owners are licensed, and nearly 6 million weapons have been entered in the federal database. Were we now to just erase these files, a billion dollars really would have been wasted.

The question worth answering is whether there is any point in spending additional dollars trying to complete the registry. Pending a comprehensive audit and administrative reforms, perhaps the best course is that recommended by a U.S. senator toward the end of the Vietnam war: Declare victory and get out.