By: Chris Selley
National Post
April 10, 2009
http://network.nationalpost.
Here’s a very illuminating paragraph from the Toronto Star’s editorial board this week:
It’s hard to make the argument for the gun registry any better than Steven Chabot, president of the association of chiefs of police,
who wrote in a letter to Harper last month: "All guns are potentially dangerous, all gun owners need to be licensed,
all guns need to be registered, and gun owners need to be accountable for their firearms."
It’s hard to make the argument for the gun registry any better, in other words, than by imperiously claiming it’s absolutely essential without citing any supporting evidence at all. Sadly, that’s pretty much the state of play at One Yonge, on this and several other issues.
There are few op-ed phenomena sadder or more predictable than gun registry fans trotting out the opinions of police organizations to support their case. If the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police defended the use of Tasers, I bet the Star’s editorialists wouldn’t take their word for it. Well, no need to speculate—here they are in February, most emphatically not buying the CACP’s defence of the use of Tasers. The fact is, if the CACP told them it was raining outside, they’d verify it with three independent sources before reporting it. But on gun control, that rare point of intersection between the opinions of the two entities, they give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s less an honest argument than it is a classic debate tactic for dealing with people one assumes are hidebound ideologues. When perfervid pro-gun control types mention they’re onside with the police, they’re really saying, “look here, you pistol-stroking troglodytes, your best friends the cops like the gun registry. You wouldn’t want to disagree with your best friends the cops, would you?”
The CACP indulges in a little of that too, actually, in the letter the Star quoted:
It is our assessment that Bill C-301—by softening controls on machine guns, by allowing the transport of fully automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons to civilian shooting ranges, by ending the registration of long guns such as rifles and shotguns (the weapons most often used in domestic homicides and suicides), and by relaxing the current restrictions on handguns, semi-automatic assault and tactical weapons—would seriously compromise a system that is working to the betterment of personal, community and police officer safety.
“Oh crap, domestic violence,” politicians are meant to say in response. “Everyone back away slowly. Van Loan! Quick! Cut a cheque!” But hang on: how many domestic homicides and suicides are we talking about? Does the gun registry stop them from happening? Does it help police solve the crimes? The letter doesn’t say. Over to the Coalition for Gun Control, whose research the CACP often cites on this issue. The coalition does indeed support gun control (as one would expect) as a “small but important part of addressing the problem of violence against women.” They make a logical and, I think, rather compelling argument that registration goes hand-in-hand with tough, common-sense licencing rules—for example, denying or revoking licences to those convicted of domestic violence offences—in that it’s pointless rescinding a licence if you don’t know how many guns its bearer owns. Of course there will be people who acquire and wreak havoc with unregistered long guns, but for the very little money and palaver a properly run gun registry should involve—it is, after all, nothing more than a dead-simple database—this shouldn’t necessarily be cause for outrage.
Our long gun registry, however, is cause for very justifiable outrage. It will always carry with it the shame of being a dead-simple database the government managed to cock up to the tune of billions of dollars. It will always carry the stigma of having been shamelessly, unforgivably marketed and defended as an urban anti-crime measure, when it most emphatically is not, and of having quite rightly offended great swaths of rural Canada. It’s a disaster. Kill it, I say. If an honest debate concludes a replacement is necessary, we’d be better off starting over from scratch.
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