Ahhhhhh, our Feds Have Control

[Kip Powick]

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 licenses had photographs on

them - just like driver's licenses do. But after hundreds of gun owners

were sent licenses with someone else's photo on them, the government

decided to scrap photos on the licenses 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 licenses, 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 now 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?