Sad state of affairs Canada's billion-dollar gun registry employs 1,800 bureaucrats, who spend their days tracking down duck hunters and farmers.
By comparison, Canada hired only 130 additional customs officers to protect our borders after Sept.11. Here are a few more eye-rolling facts about the gun registry, mostly unearthed by MP Garry Breitkreuz from Saskatchewan. Internal audits show that government bureaucrats have a 71% error rate in licensing gun owners and a 91% error rate in registering the guns themselves. The government admits it registered 718,414 guns without serial numbers. That means either the bureaucrats forgot to write them down, or the guns didn't have serial numbers in the first place. That's as useless as registering a vehicle simply as "a blue Ford Explorer." To these gun owners, the government has sent little stickers with made-up "serial numbers" on them, that gun owners are supposed to stick on their guns. And everybody at the gun registry is praying that criminals who steal those guns won't peel off the stickers. Some 222,911 guns were registered with the same make and serial number as other guns. That's not just useless -- it's dangerous. If someone else with a "blue Ford Explorer" is involved in a hit and run, you'll be the one getting a knock on the door by the RCMP. Out of 4,114,624 gun registration certificates, 3,235,647 had blank or missing entries -- but the bureaucrats issued them anyways. In the beginning, the government's firearms licences had photographs on them - just like driver's licences do. But after hundreds of gun owners were sent licences with someone else's photo on them, the government decided to scrap photos on the licences altogether, rather than fix the problem. Private details about every gun owner in the country are put on one computer database, called CPIC. That's valuable information to a peeping tom -- or a criminal. The CPIC computer has been breached 221 times since the mid-1990s, according to the RCMP. In August of 2002, the gun registry sent a letter to Hulbert Orser, demanding he register his guns, and warning him that it's a crime not to. Orser died in 1981. Garth Rizzuto is not dead, but he's getting older -- he applied for a gun licence 21/2 years ago. He hasn't been rejected. They're still "processing" his application. Some 304,375 people were allowed to register guns even though they didn't have a licence permitting them to own a gun. On March 1 of 2002, bureaucrats registered Richard Buckley's soldering "gun" - that's right, a heat "gun" used for welding tin and lead. No word yet on Buckley's staple guns or glue guns. Some 15,381 gun owners were licensed with no indication of having taken the gun safety courses -- one of the main arguments for licensing. Despite the billion-dollar taxpayer subsidy, gun-owners must still pay $279 for the required licences, registration, photo ID and other costs to register a single gun. That's as much as a gun costs in the first place. It's a tax -- a tax on rural Canada. The government spent $29 million on advertising for the gun registry -- including $4.5 million to Group-Action, the Liberal ad firm under RCMP investigation. But all of these follies are trivial compared to the central, unanswerable flaw in the gun registry: Since only law-abiding gun owners will register their guns, how can the registry stop criminals?
