Canada gun registry myths exposed
by Lorne Gunter
Edmonton Journal
18 July 1999
Last week, Lorne Gunter examined the 10 myths and misinformations the federal Liberals perpetrated to sell their firearms registration scheme to Canadians. This week he enumerates the five they are currently perpetrating to justify its continued existence.
The trick in landing a whale consists not only in getting him to take the bait, but in reeling him in once he bites.
Thus it has been with the efforts of Liberal cabinet ministers and spin doctors, first to sell Canadians on the notion that every shotgun, rifle and handgun in the land must be registered to prevent crime, and now to get Canadians to stick by that plan as its costs spiral out of sight and its operations bog down in a combination of ineptitude and bureaucratic overburden.
Since the registry opened on December 1, 1998, just seven months ago, it has licensed only a microscopic fraction of the gun owners the Liberals predicted would rush to participate in their utopian project, and registered an even smaller percentage of guns. While at the same time, the registry is well on its way to consuming half-a-billion tax dollars or more by this time next year.
As expenditures have skyrocketed and performance plummeted, Edmonton MP and Justice Minister Anne McLellan, and her assistants, such as registry spokesperson Jean Valin, have had to blow increasing amounts of smoke to conceal the truth from the public.
1. The registry is working well.
This claim puts one in mind of the pilot of a doomed airliner who announces to the passengers "Ignore that ocean surface hurtling toward us. The aircraft is in perfect working condition."
Last November, in a secret report prepared for the Justice department by PricewaterhouseCoopers, it was projected that during the registry's first six months of operation (to the end of May, 1999) 504,238 firearms owners would apply for one of the government's new firearms licenses and register around 1.4 million guns. This estimate was made by Justice's own Canadian Firearms Centre Research Group, which has been examining gun control issues for nearly five years now.
One would think after all that time the research group would be getting a good handle on the firearms community. But they were spectacularly wrong about Canadians' willingness to comply with registration.
Figures obtained by Saskatchewan Reform MP Garry Breitkreuz under access to information laws show that after six months (during which period alone the government may have spent upwards of $150 million on the registry), the Canadian Firearms Centre (CFC) had managed to register just 7,525 commercial gun sales to private citizens and another 13,638 private sales. That's just 21,163 private guns registered, or 1.5 per cent of the amount the Liberals had predicted.
Furthermore, it's just three-tenths of one percent of the 7 million guns the Liberals believe are in the country, which itself is a farcically low estimate. The total arsenal is undoubtedly larger, thus the fraction registered in the first six months should probably be expressed in angstroms. (Trust me, that's a really, really small unit of measurement).
Private guns, the Liberals' assured Canadians, were the great threat to public safety that justified universal registration. Yet they managed to register only 21,000 in six months, despite having around 600 to 800 civil servants devoted to the task.
Just 36,886 owners received licenses over the same period, too. The Liberals, however, cannot claim even this tiny group is in support of the registry.
Before the new law took effect there were a few more than 400,000 Canadians with valid, police-issued FACs (firearms acquisition certificates), mandatory since the late 1970s for anyone wishing to buy a gun. Thousands eagerly sought to renew their FACs on the eve of the new regime, in hopes of avoiding the complex and highly intrusive procedure of applying for one of the new licenses.
But the Firearms Act permitted the government to convert FAC renewals in the system when the registry opened into one of the new licenses. Working through the murk of the government’s own documents, MP Breitkreuz has been able to establish that at least half of the new license holders were just poor sods trying to renew their FACs who ended up with a new license instead.
Regardless, 37,000 licensees in the first six months is just 7.3 per cent of the half-a-million owners the Liberals predicted. Moreover, it is just 1.2 per cent of the 3 million owners the law insists must seek licenses by the end of 2000, just 17 months from now.
In a confidential Justice Department memo dated August 15, 1996, it is claimed “firearm owners will comply with universal registration because they will soon appreciate that it serves the interest of public safety...it is estimated that two per cent (60,000) of the gun owners/users will not comply with the law.” Perhaps the government had it reversed; perhaps it meant to forecast that only two per cent of owners would comply with the law.
Aware of how pathetic the actual numbers were, Valin began claiming near the end of last month that 1.3 million guns had been registered and 411,000 owners licensed. (Notice how close these figures are to the 1.4 million and 504,000 predicted last November, and it's easy to see why Valin started using them.) Yet Valin's new numbers were disingenuous, to say the least.
There were about 1.25 million guns registered in the RCMP's old handgun registry as of last December. Valin may claim these guns as registered under the new system, but the new law compels owners whose handguns are registered in the old system to reregister them in the new one by January 1, 2003, or face a prison term of up to five years, on a par with armed robbery or aggravated rape. Valin knows this, so when he claims these guns as already registered, it is difficult to escape the conclusion he is deliberately seeking to put a shiny veneer on a catastrophic mess.
To save this utter failure of a program, it is entirely possible the Liberals will pass an order-in-council or a quick “housekeeping” bill that will declare all handguns in the old system and all FAC holders automatically part of the new registry. Since members of the Canadian Police Association are threatening to withdraw their crucial support from the registry at their annual meeting in August, the pressure is one the Liberals to pull just such a rabbit out of their hats.
2. The registry is becoming efficient.
In late June, Valin also began telling reporters that instead of fewer than 500 firearms a day, the CFC was now processing 1,500. I doubt everything the man says, but lets indulge him for a minute.
First, this assertion puts the lie to his previous assertion (outlined above) that 1.3 million guns had been registered to June 20. To register that many guns by that date, the CFC would have had to be producing at the rate of 10,000 a day from the day it opened, not 500 a day or even 1,500. Reporters should have caught Valin's deception, but didn't.
But back to the 1,500 claim. Remember, very few private guns are being registered. Most of the guns being data entered by the CFC at its processing centre in New Brunswick are from dealers inventories. As far as private firearms are concerned, the CFC's numbers show that it was registering an average of 72 new private firearms a day between December and April, but just 26 a day in May. The government’s processing of private firearms, the ones the Liberals insist are the most hazardous to public safety, may actually be slowing down.
3. The registry has stopped more than 200 undesirable individuals from obtaining guns
In a letter to this paper last month, Valin wrote, "In the past six months, almost 200 firearms licenses have been revoked for reasons of public safety. In addition, nearly 300 individuals have had new licenses refused..."
Bravo. No gun owner I know wants guns in the wrong hands, whether those are the hands of criminals or the mentally unstable. But it is hard to see how the new registry had anything to do with this success.
As for the 200 revoked licenses, these were likely, as I have explained above, renewals of old FACs. They could have been revoked at anytime under the old system. Thus this is a victory for the enforcement of existing laws, not a vindication of the new one.
The matter of the 300 new licenses being rejected is confusing because the government will not release information on why these licenses were refused. We cannot know if the applicants affected merely filled in incorrectly one of the 135 boxes on the application, or declined to answer one of the highly personal questions. To get one of the new licenses, applicants must declare whether they have been fired recently, or gone broke, or been divorced, or been reported to police, or convicted of a crime, even one for which they received an absolute discharge. Any of these answers can be used to deny a license, as can refusal to answer even one question.
Then there is the teeniest, tiniest chance of government clerks entering the data incorrectly. I'm sure that hardly ever happens (they are certainly processing forms slowly enough to be error-free), but it might.
And even if the government began revoking 1,000 licenses of FACs a year, it would still not prove the need for gun control. One thousand bad-apple gun owners would be just 3/100ths of one per cent of the total. Since Statistics Canada estimates two per cent of the population commits crimes, this would indicate a far lower rate of criminality among gun owners than among the population at large.
4. ‘Revenues generated through license and registration fees offset all costs related to this initiative.’
Valin issued this utterly unbelievable statement in his letter to the Journal last month. Justice Minister McLellan echoed it earlier this week, “User fees will meet the start up costs and the estimated $50 to $60 million annual operation costs for the system.”
Got a calculator? Then you, too, can play Debunk the Liberal Hype.
It costs $25 for a gun owner to register a new firearms purchase, $10 to register all the guns he currently owns, and $10 to $80 to acquire a new license for himself. The 21,000 purchases to date would have generated $525,000. The 37,000 licenses issued (at, say, an average of $60), might have brought in $2.2 million. Registering existing private collections at most garnered another $50,000. Add in another $1 million for business licenses for dealers and museums, for a grand total of $3.8 million.
McLellan claims the start-up costs will be $120 million. But how does she arrive at this number? She admitted earlier this year in the House of Commons that $134 million had been spent before the registry even opened. Are we to take it that this sum ($134 million) constitutes pre-start-up costs, and is not part of her $120 million projection?
What’s more, access to information requests show expenditures had risen to $216 million by March 31, with reliable speculation out of Ottawa that to the end of June the total had reached $314 million.
Say my revenue estimates are off by a couple million. Say the true revenues to date are $6 million, or $7 million. That's still less than two per cent of the true start-up costs, not the 100 per cent McLellan and Valin claim.
And even if all of the 3 million gun owners the government believes there are registered all of the 7 million guns the government estimates (which the law says must occur by the end of 2002), and paid the maximum price for the privilege, the total revenues generated would be around $235 million, or just three-quarters of what has already been spent, with not a penny to the "$50-$60 million annual operation costs" McLellan projects.
5. Over 80 per cent of Canadians support the universal registration of firearms.
This, after the “culture of safety,” is McLellan’s and Valin’s favourite justification for the registry. Fine, roughly the same percentage of Canadians support the return of capital punishment. Can we then expect McLellan, who is the Justice minister after all, to introduce a death penalty bill during Parliament’s fall sitting?
Of course not. Roughly four-fifths of Canadians want longer sentences for criminals, the revocation of the Young Offenders Act, fewer paroles and the automatic deportation of recent immigrants found guilty of serious crimes, and the government will never take any of those steps either. What 80 per cent of Canadians want only matters to McLellan and Valin when it backs up what they already planned to do.
Then there is the small matter that popular support cannot extinguish the common law rights of the minority or make a colossal bureaucratic failure work as promised.
And what of the ease of directing the results of most polls to the desired conclusion by manipulating the questions asked? In 1993, the Coalition for Gun Control conducted a poll and asked, “It has been suggested that handguns, which are easily concealed, should be entirely prohibited for civilians.” It found 71 per cent favoured a ban on handguns.
But when researchers Taylor Buckner and Gary Mauser, working on behalf of Toronto’s Mackenzie Institute, asked the more informative and accurate, “Many Canadians have police permits to possess handguns for collecting, target shooting and self-defence purposes. Do you think...handguns should be banned?,” 74.2 per cent said no.
When the public backs gun controls, typically it is expressing support for crime control, which it mistakenly equates with gun control.
How many of the 80 per cent of Canadians McLellan likes to boast about would still support her registry if they knew that after a confiscation of semi-automatic guns and pump-action shotguns in Australia two years ago, armed robberies went up 44 per cent, assaults 8.6 per cent and murders 3.2 per cent?
Or that after the British government in 1988 made it much harder for civilians to own shotguns and rifles, in the next six years private gun ownership declined by 22.4 per cent and violent crime rose by 33.6 per cent? Or that the safest communities and states in the U.S. (which often have far less crime, including murders, than comparable Canadian towns and cities) are those with the highest rates of private gun ownership?
And what of the observation by retired University of Ottawa professor Al Dorans that the UN ranks Canada, Norway and the U.S. as the best countries in which to live, and, separately, also ranks them as the three countries with the highest levels of law-abiding civilian gun ownership?
No amount of popular support will make the Liberals’ registry a good idea.
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