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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fresc who wrote (4967)	5/4/2005 11:15:29 AM
From: Gulo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37571

Canada's gun-control program is a success: More than 2 million firearm owners (90 per cent) are now licensed and almost 7 million firearms (85 per cent) are registered. More than 9,000 people have been denied firearm licences under the new program. I don't know how you can even begin to swallow that BS. Try getting some data from an objective site. None, I repeat, NONE of the 9000 licenses denied were denied because of the new gun registration program. They were denied because of the OWNER licensing program, which has been in place for decades. In fact, the new program would not have denied Marc Lepine either his license or registration. There is no intrinsic value in registration! The real question is: "Is the registry proving useful to the tune of half a billion dollars per year?" The answer clearly, CLEARLY, (excuse the shouting) is no. The registration status is never even known for the majority of firearms involved in homicides, and 86 percent of those for which the status was known were not registered. The number of gun homicides always has been and hopefully always will be very low in Canada. So low that the spending of even the absurdly optimistic figure of $70 million per year would not be justified even if it completely eliminated all homicides with long guns. The percentage of guns registered is also vastly overestimated. From people I know, I'd say less than 50% of guns are registered. Those that are not registered now will never be registered because of the criminalization of paperwork. The drop in gun crime over the last 30 years is obviously not due to the more recent gun registration requirement. In fact, while the overall homicide rate has been falling, the LONG GUN rate has not fallen since the introduction of the registration requirement! You can't create a large criminal class without consequences. I can pull stats out of context too. 2003 Stats (from StatsCan): Guns up slightly — 29 per cent of victims, up nine victims from 2002. Stabbings down — 26 per cent of victims, 40 less than 2002. There continues to be public support for the program because people are too lazy to study an issue for more than a few seconds. When described in 8-second sound bites, it sounds like the program "gets tough on crime" and that is as far as people are willing to analyze it. The public is notoriously poor at doing cost-benefit analyses when public money is at stake. They simply don't care how much money is spent if it makes them feel good. The fact that the program could be replaced with a million dollar bounty on each murderer for much lower overall cost doesn't sink in. A bounty may not be all that effective, but it would be more effective than registration. Why don't you look at other jurisdictions that have enabled similar legislation? You'll see what poor policy leads to. -g