I was senior advisor to both the Deputy Minister and Minister on the
gun control file during the tenure of Kim Campbell as Minister of
Justice.   I am a lifelong hunter and shooter.  I am speaking out now
because I think that Minister Rock is making a tragic error in
attempting to intimidate Canadian shooters with his threat of criminal
prosecution if someone succeeds in stealing their unrestricted
firearm.   Shooters will be less likely to cooperate with existing laws
that - at least arguably - bear some rational connection with gun
safety.  I am also very familiar with the plans for ammunition control
that dove-tail with the projected registration scheme, and regard this
as an unworkable mess that will  radicalize shooters - whereupon they
will be politically crushed.



April 21, 1995

RE: Article by gun control expert critical of universal registration.

............................................................

REGISTRATION FOLLIES

by John Dixon

Is there really anything left to say about gun control?  The
generally informed public must be coming to think that gun owners
all suffered severe head injuries in childhood.  Why else make
such a fuss about something as innocuous as registering their
stupid guns?

Of maybe there is a story here that hasn't quite come out.  This
is my view, and I'll try to connect my story with the case for
universal firearms registration that Justice Minister Allan Rock
made in these pages on April 11th. (Please see Why smugglers and
criminals will be hurt by gun registration)

But before we even start into that, it is important to get one or
two facts on the table.  Firstly, there has long been a
distinction in Canadian law between "restricted firearms" - such
as handguns and military assault rifles - and "unrestricted
firearms" - such as ordinary deer rifles, duck guns, and .22s. 
Restricted firearms have always required registration, and as the
name implies, there are very stringent restrictions placed upon
their use, storage, and transportation.  

So when Mr. Rock talks about "universal registration", he is not
(although he sounds as if he is) talking about introducing gun
registration to Canada.  We've had registration since the 1930s. 
He is talking about extending the existing registration scheme to
ordinary hunting and target firearms - field and stream guns, as
I like to call them.      

Now to business. Mr. Rock concedes at the outset of his article
that gun registration cannot directly affect criminals, because
criminals don't register their guns.  He then goes on to suggest
that maybe it could indirectly hurt them by encouraging honest
hunters to store their deer rifles more securely.   

The logic goes something like this: if a street criminal steals
my deer rifle, and the police recover it from him, they will be
able to trace it back to me and charge me with the criminal
offence of insecure storage of my gun.  This possibility will
scare hunters into strict compliance with the secure storage laws
for sporting firearms (in force since 1992), making it "harder
for street criminals to arm themselves."   

But this logic unravels quickly when it is understood that the
existing secure storage regulations for unrestricted firearms
(concerning which Mr. Rock has proposed no changes) were neither
designed nor drafted to discourage theft.  The purpose of these
regulations is to prevent the improper or impulsive use of
sporting guns by children or untrained adults.  The existing
requirement is that all guns be stored unloaded, apart from their
ammunition, and rendered inoperable either by the removal of a
vital part or by the use of a simple locking device.  Obviously,
if a securely stored gun was stolen, it would be a simple matter
to cut a wire, saw through a small bolt, or supply a missing part
in order to restore the gun to full function. 

The regulations were set up in this way because where sporting
guns are concerned, the threat is not from theft by street
criminals (they don't want deer rifles in the first place) but
from accidents.  So when Minister Rock says that "the secure
storage of firearms by lawful gun owners would reduce gun theft
significantly", he must be thinking about restricted firearms.

As discussed above, restricted firearms are subject to stringent
storage requirements that have theft-prevention as a principal
object.  But since these guns have required registration since
the 1930s, the Minister's proposal to extend registration to
sporting firearms is completely irrelevant to them.  As it is,
the registration system for restricted weapons has always been an
expensive mess, and neither police nor courts make any systematic
use of it.  
  
But at this point, one can imagine a different sort of argument
being made, which goes something like this: "So what if gun
registration does no real good in terms of crime control.  It
can't do any harm.  Why not have it just for its own sake?"

The reason not to have it for its own sake is that it is
staggeringly, astonishingly expensive.  The present registration
scheme, which involves handguns and military rifles, is costing
taxpayers $82 per restricted firearm.  There are between six and
twenty million sporting guns in Canada, which means that
extending the registration system to them WILL COST A MINIMUM OF
HALF A BILLION DOLLARS in initial costs.  Taxpayers are going to
bear the largest part of this burden, because hunters and target
shooters could never turn up this kind of money in one season. 
And as Yogi Berra said of the fans: "if they won't come, there's
nothing you can do to stop them."  Massive non-compliance would
bring the scheme to the point of political crisis even before the
budgetary time-bomb of its cost went off.       

Now, it is hard to imagine that the Minister of Justice for
Canada doesn't have the resources to know all of this.  He must
also know that the more onerous, intimidating, and stigmatizing
the bureaucratic obstacles placed in the way of participating in
shooting sports, the fewer people will continue to own guns or
acquire them. The fewer people who own guns, the fewer there will
be to oppose the next round of control, and so the process will
ratchet forward.  

It is this agenda - long the dream of the Coalition for Gun
Control, but publicly disavowed by the Department of Justice -
that the field and stream crowd now suspect is operative.  And
that is why they so mistrust Mr. Rock, and fear his next moves.  

The irony is that legitimate gun owners in Canada have always
enthusiastically responded to firearms safety and training
programs - whether mandatory or voluntary.  So Allan Rock may be
pulling off the ultimate in negative political alchemy - taking a
bunch of Canadians who have always been part of the gun safety
solution and turning them into part of the problem.  


Dr. John Dixon served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Deputy
Minister of Justice from 1991 to 1993.  He was a guest last
Spring at the J.F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where
he spoke about gun control issues in Canada and the United
States.