As Bill C-19 is slated for an inevitable approval in Parliament due to
the Tory majority Harper has achieved in the last federal election,
Conservatives are now arguing that firearms registration is in itself a
waste of time and resources.
A National Post column today made
the point that according to the research of Gary Mauser, professor
emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby B.C., the murder rate in
Canada had gone down only 1% since the introduction firearms licensing
and that in the decade prior to it’s institution it had gone down 9%.
The
gist of the made is that licensing cannot be considered as a
homicide reduction or prevention strategy because hardener criminals and
murderers don’t register their guns in the first place.
The
article also presents further evidence that the number of murders
actually committed with a registered firearm is almost inconsequential
to the total number of 7,720 homicides committed between 1997 and 2009.
Out of this total, only 151 were committed by a person with a licensed
gun.
Despite this evidence, one can find several weaknesses in
the conservative argument to scrap firearms registration completely. The
first is the idea that people whom register firearms in the first place
do not originally intend to commit a crime, and if they just so happen
to commit one down the road, then the process of prosecuting them is
that much more expedited since they can clearly be identified as the
owners of a murder weapon. Second, according to the data showing that
approx. 151 homicides were committed with registered firearms, one can
say that because of the registry we have now an additional 151 murderers
behind bars. Murderers whose apprehension and prosecution went probably
much faster due to the registry versus if they had non-registered
weapons.
Finally, to account for the previous drop in the
homicide rate of 9% before the introduction of the firearms registry,
one cannot say that it’s due to the introduction of this kind of
regulation that the drop in homicides has slowed down. That somehow the
registry has in fact had a detrimental effect on the homicide rate.
This
is what conservatives seem to be insinuating, that perhaps no
regulation of any kind on firearms will have a positive effect on the
homicide rate.
Unfortunately. the Conservative logic is false.
There could have been any number of other factors, such as better
policing, more funding for crime prevention strategies, people being
less violent in general, rehabilitative sentencing versus more
punishment for lesser crimes, etc. that could have effect the
significant drop in the homicide rate in the decade prior to the
introduction of the registry.
So until it can be conclusively
proven that gun regulation is in fact detrimental to policing and has a
negative effect on the crime rate, in particular homicide, in Canada,
conservatives need to shut their traps and stop pushing their
ideological agenda on the rest of Canadians, in particular the liberals
in Ontario.
For more information on the Conservative argument
against firearms regulation and on Bill C-19, see the following article
in the National Post
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/25/lorne-gunter-gun-licences-should-go-the-way-of-the-registry/
