Canada's "Gun registry: Still wasting tax dollars"

PUBLICATION: The Windsor Star
DATE: 2005.06.14
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Editorial/Opinion
PAGE: A6
SOURCE: Windsor Star

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Gun registry: Still wasting tax dollars

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If Canada's criminals registered their firearms, and deadly weapons smuggled from the United States were similarly registered, the billion dollars spent on Canada's firearms registry might seem like a wise investment.

But criminals don't register their firearms and the registry, despite what its proponents claim, has not made for safer communities. The program, which was only supposed to cost taxpayers $2 million when it was introduced in 1995, hasn't taken guns away from criminals or removed them from city streets.

Last week, Windsor police seized a .357 handgun during a drug raid on a home in the 500 block of Janette Avenue. That weapon had been reported stolen from the United States and wasn't registered in Canada. Nor were the 10 semi-automatic weapons police took off the streets in late April. Those non-registered firearms included one with a laser-sight and a Tec-9 machine pistol with a 30-round clip. Good police work, not the useless registry, netted those guns.

The .22 calibre Beretta that Jack Pharr used to gun down 22-year-old Brian Bolyantu in downtown Windsor wasn't to be found in Canada's gun registry and neither was the .357 Magnum that Kenyatta Watts used to kill Mohammed Charafeddine. People like Pharr and Watts don't register their weapons.

The only people who register their firearms are law-abiding citizens who are being unfairly targeted by an ill-conceived program designed to score votes in urban Canada at the expense of rural residents.

How does forcing an Essex County hunter to register his rifle make downtown Windsor safe from gunplay? It doesn't and it never will no matter how much money the government pours down the black hole of the gun registry. . . .

Sorry, I don't have the link to this.