NOTE:
This column also appeared in The Calgary Sun
PUBLICATION:
The Edmonton Sun
DATE:
2002.03.23
SECTION:
Editorial/opinion
PAGE:
11
SOURCE:
Edmonton Sun
BYLINE:
Doug Beazley
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LES NESSMAN WOULD LIKE OUR GUN CONTROL
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Remember
the old sitcom WKRP? Remember how Les Nessman, the mad-as-a-March-hare news
director, had dotted lines of masking tape running around his desk where he
thought his walls ought to be? And how he always behaved as if the walls were
actually there?
I've
been thinking about Les quite a bit lately, because I've been thinking about gun
control. And I've come to a conclusion: anyone who believes we've got gun
control in this country is not only living in Les's office, he's seeing walls
that aren't there.
The
federal Firearms Act has attracted precious little serious criticism from press
pundits in the East, and even less interest from the voting public at large.
There's a reason for this. Most voters in urban Ontario support gun control,
and, since few of them own guns, few of them have had to wrestle with this
bureaucratic Hydra themselves.
In
that sense, gun control is the perfect government policy initiative. Most
boondoggles step on many toes and leave heavy tangible evidence. When the B.C.
fast-ferry fiasco broke, the Clark government's bungle was obvious: they spent
$460 million on three ferries that were supposed to cost $210 million total, and
ended up with three mothballed boats no one wants to buy to this day.
But
with gun control, there's no single smoking gun. It's costly, it's
controversial, it abridges people's rights and causes them great inconvenience -
but it's very hard to prove to the public beyond a shadow of a doubt that it
can't work. And even harder to make them pay attention.
All
we've got are statistics and anecdotes. When the law was introduced, the cost
estimate for implementing the registry was $85 million. Cost to date:
$689,760,000 and rising. And it's still not finished.
Deadlines
have been shoved forward several times. The Canadian Firearms Centre claims to
have received forms from 1.1 million gun owners. But they're just hauling
numbers out of a hat. The feds may claim the task is two-thirds complete, but
Canadian Alliance critic Garry <Breitkreuz> has done his own math, based
on firearms import and export stats.
His
office estimates there are 16.5 million guns in the country, which would make
the task of registering all of them virtually impossible.
A
process that was supposed to be as relatively painless as getting a car
registered has turned into a Sargasso Sea of red tape. Gaffes abound. One man
gets 57 registration certificates back for his 16 guns. An Alberta man gets his
licence back from the CFC, and finds his picture has morphed into that of an
unknown woman.
Just
this week, we heard from a Manitoba man who decided, as a lark, to try and
register his soldering gun as a firearm. His registration came in the mail. Now
the CFC is threatening him with fines and jail time, when it's quite obviously
the system that's screwing up.
We
in the newspaper business hear these stories all the time. Registration forms
for non-restricted weapons aren't even checked by human eyes at first: they're
scanned into the database willy-nilly, then fired back to the applicant for
"verification."
Which
means the information in the system is utterly useless: to police, to
statisticians, to those who craft policy. The CFC claims these are the normal
glitches that come with a young system. But it's been better than five years.
How
did we end up in this mess? Because of a lobby in favour of "gun
control," and an understandable suspicion on the part of most urban
Canadians that gun ownership is antisocial and dangerous. Polls routinely find a
large majority of Canadians favour gun control, with good reason: most of them
are thinking of Uzis, not squirrel guns.