Letter to the Editor – Long Gun Registry
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Letter to the Editor
Now that the emotional debate over the Long Gun Registry has cooled down somewhat, and the four northern Ontario NDP federal MP’s bill C-580 has received the attention it deserved, it is perhaps time to examine some hard, accurate statistics about the effectiveness of the registry. All of the following information is from Bruce Gold’s article in Canada’s National Firearms Association Journal (1-877-818-0390) -www.nfa.ca- and is most enlightening.
According to Statistics Canada, of the 1,572 firearms homicides in the nine years from 1997 to 2005, licenced gun owners were accused 7% of the time. A full 93% of firearm homicides do not involve licenced owners and therefore cannot be connected to the long gun registry information system. An absolute failure of 93% is a poor argument for gun control and exposes the fallacy of “gun licences help the police solve crimes” myth.
Of the total of 5,194 homicides by all means over this period, 5,083, or 97.9% of homicides, did not involve a licenced gun owner. The licencing system cannot be used as a crime solving tool, if there are no licenced owners involved in the crime. In other words, our $2 Billion long gun registry, which costs multi-million dollars a year to maintain, was utterly worthless as a crime fighting tool 97.9% (5,053/5194) of the time. And to achieve this amazing result, we had to licence about 1.8 million innocent, law-abiding citizens. As a yearly average, licenced citizens accused of firearms homicide was 12. Divide this number by the number of people regulated by the gun registry, and we find that 0.000006 or 6 millionths of 1% were accused of firearm homicide in an average year.
If we assume that homicide is more important than the means of homicide, we note that of the 5,194 homicides over this period, 5,076 were not traceable to a registered gun. Therefore, we can determine that for homicides, 97.7% (5,076/5,194) of the time, gun registration was useless as a crime-solving tool. Achieving this sad result required the registration of 7.1 million firearms. We created and maintain a long gun registry because 0.0000018 or 18 ten millionths of 1% of registered guns were traceable. Even assuming without proof that this registration helped police solve a crime (a registered but stolen gun links to no one) 99.9999982% of efforts were useless as a crime fighting tool.
Leaving the emotional and political arguments aside, these cold hard facts from Statistics Canada tell us a convincing story. Is it any wonder that 72% of all Canadians want to get rid of this useless and wasteful bureaucratic monstrosity? Let’s spend the money on stopping handgun smuggling by criminals and disarming street gangs.
Simon R. Guillet
Guilletville, Ont.
