Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Oh, Canada

So pro rights people are trying to scrap the Long Guns registry up in Canada.

Now some content that sure the registry ran massively over budget but at least it tracked if a gun used in a crime came from a registered owner, except... it didn't:

Please note,” Statistics Canada wrote in response to an access to information request filed by the National Firearms Association, “that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police.” Nor does StatsCan’s annual homicide survey “collect information on the registration status of the firearm used to commit a homicide.

This raises the question: Why did it take so long for the government to begin ridding Canada of the horribly expensive, unjustifiably intrusive federal gun registry? If no one in Ottawa had any systematic way of tracking whether or not Canadians suspected of committing a violent gun crime were licensed to own a gun and had registered the gun being used, then they had no way of knowing whether registration and licensing were having a positive impact on crime.

So instead of verifying that the registration scheme was even serving it's indented purpose... they just ran on "faith", as Joe Huffman puts it.

So if the Canadian government is not even tracking if their registration scheme reduces crime what are they doing with it?

Banning 22's that look like AK-47's.

Yeah... kind of sounds like the registration scheme didn't work as advertised and is now being used to well... confiscate weapons.

Say it again: Registration leads to confiscation.

No comments: