Myth: Gun registration works

Fact: Not in New Zealand. They repealed their gun registration law in the 1980s after police acknowledged its worthlessness. ¹

Fact: Not in Australia. “It seems just to be an elaborate system of arithmetic with no tangible aim. Probably, and with the best of intentions, it may have been thought, that if it were known what firearms each individual in Victoria owned, some form of control may be exercised, and those who were guilty of criminal misuse could be readily identified. This is a fallacy, and has been proven not to be the case.”² And this costs the Australian taxpayers over $200 million annually.³

Fact: Not in Canada.

• More than 20,000 Canadian gun-owners have publicly refused to register their firearms. Many others are silently ignoring the law.

• The provincial governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have dumped both the administration and the enforcement of all federal gun-control laws right back into Ottawa’s lap, throwing the Canadian government into a paper civil war.

• And all at a cost more than 1,646% the original projected cost⁴ (the original cost was estimated at 5% of all police expenditures in Canada⁵). “The gun registry as it sits right now is causing law abiding citizens to register their guns but it does nothing to take one illegal gun off the street or to increase any type of penalty for anybody that violates any part of the legislation,” according to Al Koenig, President, Calgary Police Association.⁶ “We have an ongoing gun crisis, including firearms-related homicides lately in Toronto, and a law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them”, according to Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino .⁷

• The system is so bad that five Canadian provinces (British Columbia joins Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Ontario) are refusing to prosecute firearm owners who fail to register.⁸

• A bill to abolish the registry has been tabled (introduced) in the Canadian parliament which, if passed, would eliminate the registry completely.⁹

Fact: Not in Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany began comprehensive gun registration in 1972. The government estimated that between 17,000,000 and 20,000,000 guns were to be registered, but only 3,200,000 surfaced, leaving 80% unaccounted for.¹⁰

Fact: Not in Boston, Cleveland, or California. These cities and states require registration of “assault weapons.” The compliance rate in Boston and Cleveland is about 1%.¹¹ California originally had a 90% non-compliance rate.¹²

Fact: Criminals don’t register their guns.

This is an excerpt from “Gun Facts” by Guy Smith, available free from http://www.gunfacts.info