PUBLICATION: Calgary Herald
DATE:
2003.12.17
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Comment
PAGE:
A13
BYLINE:
Garry Breitkreuz
SOURCE:
For The Calgary Herald
ILLUSTRATION:
Cartoon: (See hard copy for illustration).
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Shooting
down the gun registry: Does Paul Martin have the nerve to scrap a flawed and
misguided program?
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If
Prime Minister Paul Martin is a man of his word, we'd expect him to scrap the
gun registry in the next few days or weeks. Why? Because he promised last week,
at a $2.8-million Liberal fundraiser, that his new government must "have
the will to shut down what doesn't work and the discipline to focus on what
can." Even the Liberals now realize that the gun registry doesn't work, and
no matter how many billions they spend on it that it will never hit the real
target: criminals.
Since
the Liberals have blown a billion implementing Bill C-68, the Firearms Act,
homicides have increased, including domestic homicides, and suicides have
increased. So much for saving lives as they promised it would. Daily police
reports confirm the Liberals' firearms program hasn't done a thing to control
the criminal use of firearms in our cities. Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino
said it best earlier this year: "We haven't yet come across any situation
where the gun registry would have enabled us to either prevent or solve any of
these crimes."
But
putting the gun registry on hold or even scrapping it won't solve the whole
problem. Nor will it even stop all the hemorrhaging of tax dollars into this
money pit. The registry is only one component of the fatally flawed Firearms
Act, and there are abundant examples of other problems with this failed
legislation. This is why five provinces and three territories refuse to help the
federal government implement and administer the firearms program and why eight
provinces refuse to enforce the act. The only way to fix the Firearms Act is to
repeal it and replace it with gun laws that are at least aimed at the right
target -- criminals.
For
example, Firearms Act regulations require every law-abiding owner of a firearm
to report his or her change of address within 30 days or risk going to jail for
up to two years. But the Firearms Act does not require the same of the 131,000
convicted criminals who have been prohibited from owning firearms by courts. The
government even admitted in Parliament that the Privacy Act protects the rights
of these convicted criminals because they failed to include this provision in
the Firearms Act. As a consequence, police only know where completely innocent
gun owners live -- not the criminals.
The
Firearms Act also permits the "inspection" of the homes of two million
law-abiding firearms owners, but not the homes of the 131,000 convicted
criminals who have been prohibited from owning firearms. Consequently, the
police can't check their homes to see if these prohibited gun owners have
actually turned in all their guns or have acquired more guns illegally. This
flaw in the Firearms Act is one of the reasons why Hells Angel leader Maurice
"Mom" Boucher was able to have access to a registered 9 mm handgun and
three legally owned shotguns in his home.
The
Liberal government failed to fix these flaws when it rammed Firearms Act
amendments through Parliament earlier this year. For some reason only known to
Liberals, they still consider law-abiding gun owners more dangerous than violent
criminals who are prohibited from owning guns.
As
if we needed more proof that the Liberals' gun laws were off target, Statistics
Canada's Homicide Report for 2002 reported that 2/3 of those persons accused of
murder had a criminal record, and 73 per cent of those had a previous conviction
for a violent offence including eight who had been previously convicted for
murder.
Just
think how much safer our cities would be and how many lives could have been
saved if the billion-dollar Firearms Act allowed police to keep better tabs on
known criminals since 1995 rather than trying to track two million completely
innocent, government-licensed firearms owners.
Martin
wrote most of the cheques for this firearms fiasco while he was finance
minister. Now, he has put Anne McLellan back in charge of the mess she helped
create while she was justice minister. They both have a lot of tracks to cover
up. Unless they propose a complete rewrite of the Firearms Act, and unless they
are able to get the complete support of all the provinces and the recreational
firearms community for whatever they propose, and unless they make public the
cost-benefit analysis they've been keeping secret all these years, their
promises will fall far short of solving the problem they have created for
themselves. And sadly, Canadian taxpayers will keep paying through the nose for
nine years of Liberal incompetence and ineffective gun laws aimed at the wrong
target.
Garry
Breitkreuz is a justice critic for the Canadian Alliance