Ask me after 10 years if this was a waste :)
What is your problem? Why can't you see that even if every pie-in-the-sky hoped-for benefit of the registry were to actually occur, the price already paid is too high to justify it? It is fundamentally unethical and irrational to spend large amounts of money on trivial problems when the same money can actually save lives or relieve suffering (and yes, gun crime in Canada IS trivial compared to, say, drunk driving). We have enough real problems to deal with. For crying out loud, the Feds spend 10 TIMES as much on registry paperwork as on Cancer research!
The reason gun crime in the U.S. is higher than in Canada has little to do with the availability of guns. In fact, if you rank states by their gun crime rates, the ones with the highest rates have the most restrictions on gun ownership. Obviously, the states with the high gun crime rates have those rates for other reasons and the restrictions on guns ownership don't help much.
BTW, The recent legislation has nothing new to do with hand-guns; the new part is the long-gun registry. Hand guns have been registered for most of the last century and that registry, to my knowledge, has never helped solve a crime. There is simply a logical disconnect between registration and crime. There is a connection between the ability to pass a background check and crime, so that isn't controversial. There is a connection between competency testing and accident rates, so that isn't controversial. It is pretty straight-forward logic.
-g |
