PUBLICATION:              National Post

DATE:                         2003.07.25

EDITION:                    National

SECTION:                  Editorials

PAGE:                         A15

SOURCE:                   ational PostStatistics; Canada 

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Shut the gun registry

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While aboriginals make up just 3% of the Canadian population, aboriginal offenders commit nearly one-quarter of the country's firearms murders and other violent crimes involving guns. Aboriginals account for a similarly disproportionate share of the victims of murder, armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. In most crime surveys, 60% to 80% of reserve residents report witnessing unsafe or even criminal misuse of firearms each year. Given that the federal government's billion-dollar gun registry is ostensibly designed to protect Canadians from gun violence, one would therefore assume the feds were aggressively moving to ensure compliance with the registry among reserve-resident natives.

But they're not. In June, Garry Breitkreuz, the Canadian Alliance's indefatigable firearms critic, obtained 136 pages of internal government statistics detailing the aboriginal community's response to the new gun registration laws. By the government's own admission, "although there appears to be pockets of high licence compliance among aboriginal communities ... there is an apparent general pattern of low-to-moderate compliance across the country."

By the most optimistic calculations, no more then 15% of natives have obtained the required gun owners' licences, and very likely far fewer. And this despite a massive, expensive effort by Ottawa to encourage aboriginals to obtain licences for themselves and registrations for their guns. Ottawa even set a special, extraordinarily easy licensing test for aboriginals, and sent teams of registration counsellors to reserves across the country. Still, few aboriginals could be bothered to comply. Across the West, where native populations and gun ownership are highest, nearly half of all reserves wouldn't even permit registration counsellors to enter. In northern Manitoba, among a dozen aboriginal communities with a combined population of more than 17,000, just 847 licence applications have been received. If you believe the hype about the registry, then the government should be sending the RCMP to reserves to round up defiant gun owners, just as the Liberals have said they will jail non-complying non-natives.

But of course, they aren't, and they won't -- though they will no doubt periodically make a symbolic show of enforcing their registry. Why? The answer is simple. As most Liberals realize without admitting, Canada's billion-dollar gun registry will never reduce gun crime, nor save a single life. It exists only because gun control is a fashionable political cause in Toronto and other urban areas where most people would not know a shotgun from a flintlock pistol. But since aboriginal rights is an even more politically fashionable cause, the gun registry -- and all the lives it will supposedly save -- has been trumped on reserves by the Liberal instinct to indulge natives.

By failing to enforce the gun registry on reserves, the Liberals are implicitly admitting that they either do not care about saving Indian lives; or that the gun registry is useless. Assuming we can discard the first, more scandalous, hypothesis, the most sensible response to Mr. Breitkreuz's laudable detective work is clearly to shut down our useless, wasteful, billion-dollar gun registry