Hoplophobes love to point to Canada as an example of their idyllic rights-free environment – firearms are heavily regulated, requiring licensing for purchasing and ownership, and also mandating complete registration of all firearms… though current numbers estimate that only 2/3s of the firearms in Canada have actually been registered. Granted, for most hoplophobes, this kind of scheme is only the beginning before they move on to bigger and better dreams, but our northern neighbors are still a favorite example for them to point at.
Or are they?
As Parliament breaks for summer, the opposition is mobilizing to stop a private member’s bill to scrap the long gun registry. Yet there is no convincing research showing that the gun registry has saved a single life.
The homicide rate had fallen impressively before 2001, when the long gun registry started, but has remained relatively stable since. In 1991, the homicide rate was 2.7 per 100,000, in 1996, the homicide rate was down to 2.1 and by 2000, it had slid to 1.8. By 2005, the homicide rate had risen to 2.0.
The gun registry had no impact on suicide rates either, even if Canadian suicide rates have declined both before and after 2001. The national suicide rate was 12.6 per 100,000 in 1991, 13.3 in 1996 and 11.7 in 2000. Since 2001, the suicide rate has declined very little; it was down slightly to 11.6 in 2005.
It is time to pull the plug on the long gun registry. The present Canadian firearms program was misdirected from the beginning. It focused exclusively on normal law-abiding people who happened to own firearms, rather than on violent criminals. It should come as no surprise that it hasn’t been effective in either saving lives or in combatting criminal violence.
(Emphasis added.)
The last two sentences of the article pretty much sum up the entire problem with any registration/licensing scheme – all such ideas are predicated on the irrational belief that, for some reason, criminals will obey those laws. Anyone with half a clue understands that criminals are called criminals exactly because they do not obey laws, but apparently that small detail has escaped the attention of hoplophobes both here and in Canada.
But, then again, Canada’s failed firearm-registration scheme was never about the criminals, was it? It was always about controlling the law-abiding citizens by making it more and more difficult and more and more onerous to actually be law-abiding. As Ayn Rand once said, the government has no power over innocent men, so it will do its best to make them into criminals, despite there already being more than too many criminals to deal with already.
Oh, and this pointless program that has had no impact on firearm-related murders or suicides, and has successfully made criminals out of between 3 and 5 million Canadians? Yeah, it has been costing that country $80,000,000 a year. Talk about a pathetic return-on-investment…
(Courtesy of Free in Idaho.)
the way of the dinosaurs | that’s all he wrote | fossilization |
It never is about return on investment either. Just control. Government is simple when you understand that.
Oh I certainly understand that, and pointed it out in the post… I was just also pointing out that the “gun registration” concept fails on just about every angle.