Andre Sponselee, CD, SSM
		Site 485, C19, RR4
		Courtenay, BC, V9N 7J3
		9.5.95, (604) 334-3996
		hunter@comox.island.net



The following is a transcript of a letter sent to me by John Dixon,
senior policy advisor to the Deputy Minister of Justice from 1991 to
1993.  He was heavily involved in the drafting of Bill C17.  He is very
much opposed to the current Bill C68 and has spoken against it many
times including last year as a guest speaker at the John F Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University where he spoke about gun
control issues in Canada and the US.

REGISTRATION FOLLIES (2)

Gun owners just don't seem to get it.  There is nothing in the Magna
Carta that says you can have a closet full of guns and keep it all a
big secret.  In fact, not even the Constitution of the United States,
famous for its (often strangely interpreted) right to keep and bear
arms, provides any exemption from gun registration.  Yet Canadian
hunters and target shooters, in a sad parody of American gun nuttyness,
have committed their weak political forces to battle against Justice
Minister Allan Rock's modest proposal to register all of the guns in
the country.

For the 80% or so Canadians who don't own guns, don't shoot guns, and
don't particularly like guns, opposition to such a logical and
innocuous gun control measure is crazy.

It gets weirder.  All handguns and military type guns have long
required registration in Canada.  The other field and stream types
affected by the new Rock proposal - deer rifles, duck guns, .22s, and
some air rifles - have required a Firearms Aquisition Certificate for
their purchase since 1978.  This means that the records of all sales of
them by dealers in Canada have been available to police for almost two
decades.

So Mr. Rock's proposal seems to do little more than extend the
registration scheme to private sales and bring this data base up to
date in one comprehensive effort.  If shooters have accepted the status
quo, why go ballistic now?   Next issue please.

A pause here as I shift gears.  Because just as the gun owners'
attitude is a mystery to the readers of  'The Globe', Allan Rock's plan
for his data base is an even bigger mystery to gun owners.

To begin with, there is no existing data base of hunting and target
firearms recorded under the Firearms Aquisition scheme.  There is no
such data base because the RCMP either destroyed the records they
collected from dealers, or simply failed to collect them and left
dealers to destroy them.  The RCMP took this rather astonishing step
because they didn't think that the information was worth assembling or
keeping.  And when you stop to think about it, you can see their
point.

The central idea behind universal gun registration is to show where all
the guns are, because knowing where all the guns are could be useful
for crime control authorities such as the police and courts.  The
catch-22, however, is that it is specifically those firearms that the
police and courts are interrested in -i.e. the ones in the hands of
actual or potential criminals- that are not registered.  So whatever
else gun registration might be good for, its relevance to crime control
is hypothetical.

It is not irrelevant to job creation, however, which is why the RCMP
quietly released the bird they had in the hand, as far too dear to
keep.  A Department of Justice study shows that it ispresently costing
$82 to register a single firearm under the existing (and relatively
simple) scheme for handguns and military rifles.  There are anywhere
between six and twenty million unregistered hunting and target firearms
presently in Canadian homes.  So the initial cost of extending
registration to these field and stream type guns will be, at a minimum,
about $500 million.  One half a billion dollars.  Minimum.  If you hear
a significantly lower estimate, enquire whether the person offering it
is arithmetically or truth challenged.

This cost will be almost entirely borne by taxpayers because most gun
owners in Canada are working or blue collar people who simply could not
find this kind of money in one season.  And, as Yogi Berra said to his
fans: "if they stay away, there is nothing you can do to stop them."
When the police threw away all of the gun purchase records, they threw
away the fulcrum needed to bring any coercive levers to bear.  Massive
non-compliance would mean the complete (as opposed to practically
complete) failure of the registration system for its stated purpose,
and lead to its probable abandonment.  So it will be nearly free to
begin with, in the hope of building up a critical mass of early
compliance with which to boot-strap the program forward when taxpayers
wake up to what it is really costing them.  By which time, of course,
Allan Rock will be far, far away from the explosion of this budgetary
time bomb.

So gun owners aren't fighting universal registration on some cock-eyed
American rights principle.  They are fighting it because they think it
is the preliminary step of a hidden government agenda of controlling
firearms by eliminating them.  Anything costing half a billion dollars
must have a very serious policy object, and if it isn't crime control,
the gun people suspect that the logical alternative is a gradual
program of confiscation.  Whether or not this is so, it is a seed that
Allan Rock planted himself last Spring when he declared his preference
for a system that would ban the home possession of any and all firearms
in Canadian cities.  He quickly abandoned the public promotion of this
plan, but not before it gave new meaning to the word "polarization" in
connection with gun control.

The largest part of compliance with any regularory scheme depends upon
voluntary cooperation.  If gun owners are taught to be more cynical
about the motives of their lawgivers, they will be less likely to
cooperate in the continuing implementation of the existing gun control
laws, which introduced new measures in 1992 - such as strict safe
storage rules which require that all guns be stored under lock and key
- that bear a logical relationship to public safety.  So the down side
of the universal registration scheme is not limited to its own
failure.

This loss of existing culture of compliance among legitimate gun owners
may prove to be the most serious consequence of the registration mess.
Mr. Rock is on his way to attaining a pinnacle of negative legislative
alchemy: turning a group that has always been part of the Canadian gun
safety solution 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.

END