Long gun registration: a poorly aimed longshot.

• Author: Stenning, Philip C.

Like so much of the discussion around gun control during the last 40 years in Canada, the recent debate over the gun registry has been plagued by misinformation, misrepresentations, and some rather outlandish claims. The discussion might be returned to a more reasonable footing if some of these could be put to rest, but I doubt it; support for and opposition to gun control has tended to be based on strongly held convictions rather than on solid evidence, and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, it can do no harm to at least try to sort out myths from facts in this highly contentious policy arena.

One such myth is that having a gun registry is something new for Canada. In fact, Canada has had a gun registry for years (since the 1930s), although for most of that time only handguns and certain other "restricted" firearms (including some long guns) have required registration. (1) However, not even the attempt to register all "ordinary" long guns (hunting rifles and shotguns) is new here; a 1940 amendment to the Defence of Canada Regulations required all such guns to be registered with the RCMP. (2) It remained in force until the war ended in 1945. What is new about the 1995 legislative requirements, then, is not the creation of a gun registry but the requirement, for the first time in peacetime in Canada, for all long guns to be registered. Of course, it is difficult to draw from the experience of universal registration of firearms during wartime any persuasive conclusions about the likely effectiveness of such registration in preventing or reducing firearms abuses 50 years later in peacetime. (3) The issue, however, is not whether we should retain a gun registry but whether we should require registration of ordinary long guns rather than just requiring long gun owners to be licensed, as was the case prior to 1996.

One of the reasons advanced for universal long gun registration has been that it will help police in investigating crimes and in taking precautions when responding, for instance, to domestic violence, hostage-taking, or other "gun calls'(see Canada, Department of Justice 1994: 14). In support of this rationale, proponents of long gun registration have recently begun to cite statistics concerning the number of times the police have requested information from the new registry. (4) These statistics are not, by themselves, very informative, however, since we have not been told (a) how frequently the police made such requests before long guns were included in the registry, (b) what proportion of current police requests concern long guns rather than other kinds of firearms that are required to be registered, or (c) what proportion of them concerned gun registration as opposed to gun owner licensing information, also included in the registry. (5) We would need all three pieces of information before we could draw any conclusions about how much more helpful, if at all, the registry has become to the police as a result of the introduction of registration of long guns. In this regard, Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino's recent assertion that the registry has proved to be of no significant additional assistance to his police service (one of the largest in the country) in investigating firearms-related crimes should perhaps not be lightly dismissed as simply the aberrant opinion of one police chief. (6) Indeed, it is very doubtful whether even the requirement for handgun registration as such (as opposed to the requirement for those who own or possess handguns to obtain permits or licences) has ever had much impact on handgun use in crime or on any other kind of handgun abuse, although there is no clear Canadian evidence on this.

The focus on crime prevention and reduction as the principal justification for universal registration of "ordinary" long guns, however, is one of the more inexplicable quirks of the gun control debate, since, by any criteria that I can think of, long gun use in crime is not by any means the most serious of the problems that controls on long gun possession should be designed to address. It is no secret that the major social harm attributable to long gun abuse is firearms suicide. (7) During the period from 1995 to 1999, for instance, 4,225 Canadians were recorded as having committed suicide with firearms, the great majority of these with "ordinary" long guns. (8) During the same period, 758 Canadians were recorded as victims of firearms homicides, (9) and consistently only about half of these crimes were committed with ordinary long guns. (10) Thus, ordinary long guns accounted for 10 or 11 times as many suicides as homicides during this five-year period.

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