Why the long-gun registry doesn’t work — and never did [Canada] [View all]

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registration is a common gun control desire. It was a colossal and expensive failure in Canada.

In March, Stephen Harper’s government reversed decades of increasing restrictions on civilian firearms, scrapping the controversial long-gun registry on grounds that it was wasteful and ineffective. Gun laws, the prime minister correctly said, should focus on criminals rather than law-abiding citizens such as farmers and hunters.

In 2002, the auditor-general revealed that the Firearms Centre had grown out of control. Despite political promises that the program would not cost over $2-million, costs were expected to exceed $1-billion by 2005. By 2012, this had ballooned to $2.7-billion. The auditor-general uncovered irregularities including mismanagement and corruption. Her findings stimulated a parliamentary revolt. In 2003, Parliament imposed an annual spending cap. The auditors’ reports led to RCMP investigations of Liberal insiders and contributed to the fall of the Liberal government in 2006.

To this day, it has been claimed that the registry is important in protecting women. But in fact, there is no convincing evidence that registering firearms has been effective in reducing either homicide rates overall, or spousal murders in particular. Even though homicide rates have been gradually falling since the 1970s, a wide variety of researchers have been unable to find solid evidence linking gun laws to this decline. Changing demographics, not firearms laws, better explain the decline in homicides involving long guns over the past 20 years. It is difficult to argue that Canadian gun laws are effective when homicide rates have dropped faster in the United States than in Canada since 1991.


A third claim is that long guns are the weapon of choice in domestic homicides, and that registration can help to identify the perpetrator. (This is related to the aforementioned claim that guns promote violence against women.) In fact, the long-gun registry and licensing are rarely needed by police to solve spousal homicides for three reasons: (1) in almost all cases, spousal murderers are immediately identified; (2) firearms are not often used to kill female spouses; and (3) the firearms used by abusive spouses to kill their wives are almost all possessed illegally. Statistics Canada data show that just 4% of long guns involved in homicides were registered.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/11/gary-mauser-why-the-long-gun-registry-doesnt-work-and-never-did/