Tories announce plan to eviscerate Gun Registry

Because they know they don't have the votes in the Commons to kill the Gun Registry outright, the Tories are doing the next best thing:

The Conservative government will no longer ask long-gun owners to pay to register their weapons and will not prosecute those who fail to register at all, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced Wednesday.

Day said the government will reimburse long-gun owners who registered their weapons, and it will table legislation to repeal the registry of non-restricted firearms.

The government plans to transfer responsibility for the Canada Firearms Centre to the RCMP. It will also cut $10 million in annual spending at the centre and redirect it to crime-fighting.

After the recent revelations that the former government cooked the numbers to hide the fact that they were spending far more on the registry than Parliament had allowed, this is good news. The data in the registry is so unreliable that even for supporters of gun control, this is a good thing. One of the big arguments in favour of the registry was that police, in responding to a call, could be informed if firearms were on the premises before they arrived. The problem is that the data is so badly organized that it couldn't be sent to officers in real time, and even if it was, it was neither complete nor up-to-date. Police officers should probably always assume that weapons might be present on any call . . . to not do so is to put themselves at greater risk.

The gun registry was always a boondoggle: the kinds of weapons most frequently used in violent crimes were not hunting rifles, shotguns, and .22's, but those were the majority of firearms owned by Canadians (both among those who chose to register and those who "forgot").