Saying Goodbye to the Gun Registry

In which the country can finally, once and for all, be rid of insufferable columns on the benefits and drawbacks of the long-gun registry.

The Conservative government introduced legislation this week that will kill the federal gun registry, 16 years after Jean Chretien's Liberal government brought it into existence. The Sun chain, never being one for understatement, welcomes the registry's death as "a mammoth victory of the people over Big Brother." Ever since its creation, the registry has kept records on "seven million non-restricted and therefore legal firearms affecting hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Canadians," the editorialists note. "Their names have no business being there." As for the police associations that have routinely sworn that police use the registry thousands of times a day, the Sun says beat cops were already using a much better mentality when entering homes that could have had guns: "Assume nothing but the worst." Well, we're sure the police are overjoyed that that's all they'll have to prepare them now that the registry's gone.

The Ottawa Citizen's editorial board brings some much-needed perspective to the debate about the registry, lamenting that "it's as if all parties want to squeeze every last bit of propaganda potential out of the thing before it dies." Whether it's a Tory, NDP, or Liberal MP, a columnist or an activist, everybody on either side of the debate is prone to vastly overemphasizing the importance of the registry. "It was never a major tool for crime prevention, although it did have its uses. It was never an assault on the freedom of gun owners. It's demonstrably false to say that long guns are not used in the commission of crimes. It cost an obscene amount to set up, but its operating cost seems to be tiny, and there's no way to recoup the set-up costs no matter what the Conservatives do," the board writes. "In short, it never mattered very much at all." We're of the mind that its importance was so overblown because just about every other cultural clash in this country has been largely settled and/or taped over. The registry was only important insofar as getting gun-lovin' rural folk and their anti-firearm urban opposites out to the ballot box. We suppose the omnibus bill will make for a suitable substitute.

Chantal Hebert of the Toronto Star remarks that however you feel about the registry (and as far as we go, it's a barely registerable shrug), its death is proof that the Tories lived up to their promise of not springing any surprises on the public. "Iconic commitments such as a punitive law-and-order agenda, the demise of the long-gun registry and the elimination of the per-vote subsidy to the parties have materialized as expected," writes Hebert, just as "the government’s penchant for using its reinforced parliamentary arsenal to curtail debate has been par for the course for a governing party that routinely closed down Parliament in the face of political adversity in its minority days." Ditto for the party's attitude toward Quebec, which is about the same as ours toward the gun registry (again: "meh.") So, we have the same old partisan, authoritarian-lite bunch of men in suits that we did for the last five years, albeit with actual power to follow through with their ambitions. But now that the registry's gone, and the bulk of their legislative promises already on the table, how are they going to fill out their next four years? Oh, right.