The federal government, supposedly, has no money to restore the $140 million that its predecessor cut from the Crow transportation benefit. Prairie provincial governments supposedly can’t find a few hundred million to keep open more rural schools and hospitals.
But bureaucrats from both levels of government are reported contemplating new firearms registration rules that could cost the nation more than a billion dollars.
This is economic and social insanity, fuelled by the insatiable demands of the “politically correct” zealots. Canada already has stringent firearms regulations, and making them more extreme would simply penalize people who are law-abiding.
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Since 1979, Canadians have had to obtain firearms acquisition certificates in order to acquire firearms. Existing firearms, however, did not have to be registered and no certificate is needed to possess them.
The association of firearms dealers and collectors in Western Canada, however, says government officials are considering proposing legislation to require certificates to possess firearms, which would mean that all existing firearms would have to be registered at an estimated cost of $60 each.
How many weapons are involved? No one knows for sure, and recent estimates have ranged from six million to 40 million. If the National Firearms Association’s estimate of 21 million is correct, that would mean a cost of $1.2 billion to register all firearms.
In practice, however, the dealers say many people would not register: “One must figure in the cost of going out and finding these guns, with the ensuing legal costs, jail terms and outright anarchy which might ensue.”
What would be achieved by trying to make criminals out of people who don’t feel it’s right to have to get a $60 certificate to keep a .22 on a farm?
More regulations and restrictions wouldn’t bother criminals or the lunatic fringe, since they would continue to use the black market and scoff at any laws.
Similar considerations apply to the issue of whether to ban all handguns, another measure officials are contemplating. As the firearms dealers said, the effect would be predictable: “The entire handgun trade would immediately become invisible. The black market along a common border with the U.S.A. would flourish and the government’s desired effect of handgun control would fail given that you can’t control what you can’t see.”
As one of our Open Forum correspondents noted last week, more people are killed in Canada by lightning than by legal handguns. And most of those are in the cities. Rural areas don’t need costly new regulations.
