PUBLICATION:  The Toronto Sun

DATE:  2002.01.02

SECTION:  Editorial/opinion

PAGE:  14

COLUMN:  Editorial

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GRITS' GUN LAW MISFIRES

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Sometimes we wonder if federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan, the keeper of the country's vastly expensive firearms registry, ever reads crime stories. Like these from Monday's Sun:

- "Three teen bandits raided a Scarborough variety store and threatened two workers with a sawed-off shotgun ... "

- "Two downtown gas station attendants stared down the barrel of a handgun during an early morning heist yesterday... "

- "Three thugs in their late teens, armed with two handguns, stormed a Brampton house ... yesterday ... "

Add to these items the recent shooting of a Toronto cop (who is thankfully recovering), and the fact that, at last count, fully 53% of Toronto's 59 murders in 2001 were committed with guns.

Now, what does all this have to do with McLellan's registry, which requires all shotguns and rifles to be registered by Jan. 1, 2003? Nothing!

That's precisely the point. Gun crime - a rampant, growing problem in all Canadian cities - is not affected one bit by this costly bureaucratic exercise. Only law-abiding gun owners are.

And the flaws in the registry itself are laughable. Two months ago, McLellan announced gun owners could now register for "free" - though with costs to taxpayers now believed to be at the half-billion-dollar mark (the feds won't say for sure), the registry is anything but "free."

A recent letter to the editor on these pages further illustrated the mess: a gun owner said he registered his firearms a year ago (and paid for it), only to receive messages from Ottawa urging him to hurry up and register. He later received a letter showing two of his rifles had been wrongly registered as shotguns.

That's your tax dollars at work - while cops like our Chief Julian Fantino have to fight for funds to combat gun crime. And we can only expect more lunacy as the day approaches - less than a year from now - when unregistered gun owners will automatically become criminals. Fantino recently announced a new crackdown on illegal guns. Think how much he could do with some of what the registry is wasting.