Canada: Time to get rid of the long-gun registry?

http://www.canada.com/news/registry+boondoggle+should/2182916/story.html

It's a good time for the federal gun registry to die.

After 11 years of low-calibre crime-fighting-- shooting blanks at bad guys, backfiring financially or taking aim at all the wrong targets--the billion-dollar boondoggle uncovered in 2002 by the auditor general will likely be placed on the de-registration block Wednesday afternoon.

The magic number to send the gun registry kill bill off for committee scrutiny and sober Senate thought is 10 opposition MPs.

Under intense pressure from an attack ad campaign against MPs in ridings the Conservatives don't hold where local opposition to the registry is strong, at least five Liberals and six New Democrats will likely be spooked enough to vote with the government or abstain on Manitoba MP Candice Hoeppner's private member's bill.

Unless the two opposition party leaders successfully plead for unity at caucus meetings Wednesday morning, that count should stick, lifting the bill over its highest hurdle and putting it on track to unplug the registry and shred its records.

The beauty of using the private-member process is how it allows the Conservatives to scrap a registry they've demonized for a decade without tarnishing their law-and-order credentials.

As a free vote, the bill's passage will allow Prime Minister Stephen Harper to tell police organizations and urban voters who support the registry that a three-party, um, coalition of MPs actually put it out of its misery, not government ideology. That's optics-only, of course. The Conservatives have tried three times to legislate the firearms registry into oblivion, only to watch the bills die. The private member bill route at least offers them some political cover.

The premise behind registering long guns (handguns will remain subject to a registration requirement which began in 1934) was always suspect. The greater the owner's propensity for illegal gun activity, the less likely they'd be to register their weapon.

"We do have a problem in Canada with gun crime, but it's handguns mixed with drugs and gangs," says Hoeppner. "It's not the lawabiding long gun owners."

The better approach, Hoeppner argues, would be to track those who are prohibited from owning firearms, most of them living without any form of weapons surveillance, and leave hunters and sport shooters subject only to obtaining a licence when they purchase unrestricted firearms.

It's the right move, but it doesn't mean they'll be shuttering any time soon that unmarked brown box of an office building that houses registry computers in Miramichi, N.B.

Opposition MPs supporting the move could get cold feet when the final roll is called or the Liberalcontrolled Senate could footdrag the bill until the next election kills it yet again. But that would really prolong the inevitable. Despite the 7.3-million firearms on file now, the vast majority being hunting rifles or unmodified shotguns, the registry has become outdated and thus unreliable after three years of reporting amnesties.

Besides, it just doesn't seem to work.

While proponents point to the falling crime rate as proof it has merit, serious crime rates are falling much faster in the United States where the right to bear arms is constitutionally guaranteed.

Police have warped its merits by recently showcasing a weapon seizure and wrongly boasting their haul was helped by the registry. They also exaggerate law enforcement reliance on the registry by insisting police access it about 5,000 times a day, knowing full well every search of the Canadian Police Information Centre for any reason generates an automatic search of the firearms registry.

There's lingering political sensitivity to axing the registry.

Harper, for example, has promised to preserve the 290 Miramichi and Ottawa headquarters jobs at risk from the closure.

How?Why? The last thing this bloated, deficit-ridden government needs to do is preserve employees for eliminated jobs, particularly ones of dubious merit.