Canada registry equals more gun deaths
by Lorne Gunter
Edmonton Journal
31 October 1999
In its obsessive, pig-headed and ignorant rush to register all the gopher guns and target pistols in the country, it is entirely likely the Liberal government in Ottawa will end up getting more Canadians killed than would ever have been saved had the registry lived up to the fantastical promises made in order to sell it.
This shouldn't surprise. Liberals, both big and small-l, are famous for getting stung by the law of unintended consequences.
Liberals devised universal welfare to eliminate poverty and in the attempte xpanded the ranks of the poor. They made divorce easier to get to free wives from abusive husbands and make women more independent, and ended up causing half the marriages since to break up and shackling vast numbers of women to the poverty of single motherhood. They raised taxes to pay for their multitude schemes and killed the jobs that generate the income to pay the taxes.
Why shouldn't it be that the when Liberals set out to reduce murders, accidental death and suicides by making every homeowner, farmer and hunter declare his or her firearms to the government the end result would be an increase in the number of dead Canadians? It fits the pattern.
In the nearly 11 months since the Liberals imposed their universal registry on the nation's recreational firearms community, black market gun sales have boomed. Scores of legitimate gun shops have gone under or are about to. But under-the-tables sales are as healthy as all get out.
In large part, this is because the Liberals new gun laws instantly criminalized hundreds of thousands of gun sales that for centuries had been legal. Canadians have always sold each other weapons of all sorts privately, including firearms. Such over-the-fence transactions occur as often as a quarter-million times each year, perhaps more.
Thanks to Justice Minister Anne McLellan's hysterically rigid insistence that each and every gun sale, even these neighbour-to-neighbour sales, be approved by her department in advance, nearly all these sales are now so-called black market sales.
But beyond this administrative expansion of the black market, there has been a real increase in the number illegitimate sales. Since buying a gun the Ottawa-approved way through a licensed gun shop often takes days or weeks, and costs at least $25 just for the government imprimatur, many frustrated owners are turning to - let's call them - less-conventional suppliers.
This action on the part of otherwise law-abiding firearms afficionados is lamentable, even as it is entirely understandable. Before Ottawa will approve sales to the banker down the block, or your kid's hockey coach, or the university prof who hunts with his buddies each fall, it wants to know if they are alcoholics, if they are good spouses, if they have ever lost a job or gone bankrupt, if their neighbours have any complaints about them. It wants them to build or buy expensive safes for their guns and others for their ammunition. It wants them to take lengthy and expensive safety courses; to get permission (in many cases) before they move their guns from one home to another, or from home to the shooting range. It even wants to approve in advance the willing of guns to their heirs. And Ottawa wants legitimate gun owners to pay handsomely to clear all these obstacles.
Ottawa's anti-gun minions hoped this labyrinth of inconvenience, harassment and bureaucratic proctology would, over time, cause Canada's four or five million firearms owners to give up their sport. Recreational shooting and hunting would become more trouble than they are worth, and firearms owners would voluntarily turn their guns over to police. Rather than out-and-out confiscation, this was a scheme for constructive disarmament of the civilian population.
But here comes the law of unintended consequences, again. There is no justification for denying law-abiding citizens the ownership of firearms in a democracy, in a political system in which they are the ultimate sovereigns. This was never a sentiment much articulated in Canada. Yet it turns out it was deeply held.
The gun registry is bitterly resented by legitimate gun owners in Canada, not just for its cost and convoluted intrusiveness, but for its underlying message that the government does not trust its own people.
So as McLellan's own group of hand-picked firearms experts recently told her, her government's legislation has prompted "an unchecked growth in the most unwanted elements of the firearms trade...the black market." Black market guns cannot be traced. Under the old system, gun shop owners often helped police identify suspects and the guns they purchased before they committed their crime. Black market gun sellers almost never talk; to do so would be to admit to participating in an illegal act (the under-the-table sale).
Black market guns are many times more likely to be used in crimes. Thus black market sales equal more gun deaths. McLellan and the Liberals' gun registry equals more black market sales. Therefore, McLellan and the Liberals' registry equals more gun deaths.
Moreover, three weeks ago, proof arrived of how futile the registry has been from the start. Statistics Canada says that of the 555 murders in 1998, just 151 (27.2 per cent) were committed with guns. Of those, only nine per cent, just 14, were committed with a legally owned, unregistered rifle or shotgun. All the rest were committed with guns that have had to be registered since 1934 (handguns) or with illegal guns, such as sawed-off shotguns or full automatics.
Ottawa is spending hundreds of millions of dollars, subjecting decent Canadians to horrendous administrative abuse and spurring an enormous black market on the off chance of saving 14 lives a year.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Lorne Gunter, Columnist
The Edmonton Journal
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