OTTAWA — Not all of Canada’s top cops think the long-gun registry is worth the trouble.
Ottawa Police Chief Vern White says he’s “frustrated” by the misinformation coming from both sides of the debate.
Specifically, White takes issue with registry advocates — including cop brass — saying the registry’s accessed 11,000 times a day.
“I don’t buy that line,” White said Wednesday, adding most of the hits to the registry are automatically generated. “When I call in and ask for (a criminal records check and whether a person is wanted by police), it checks the firearms registry at the same time.
“To me, that’s not an actual check of the system.”
Calgary Police Chief Rick Hanson told Parliament’s public safety committee this spring he thinks the registry is flawed and fails to tackle the real issues of gun violence.
“While the registry may be a useful investigative tool, it falls short of making the type of positive impact this country needs to be safer,” he told the committee. “No direct links have been made between the existing gun registry and the behaviour of criminals.”
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Updates:
Where does this 4 million per year come from? How many employees X 50?, 80?, 100?, 120?, thousand per yr. = 4 million? without a mention of system maintenance. How stupid do they think we are?
Maybe just keeping track of sales between individuals and new sales and very limited to just that and not all of the money spent on salaries, infrastructure, toilet paper for the office bathrooms.
Maybe just the LGR not counting all the costs of the restricted and prohibited registry and trying to keep up to date the information from decades of transactions since 1934 when they started registering handguns: Anyone want to bet how much of that information is in error or was lost went they cancelled all the old registrations and forced everybody to re-register what was already registered. Lots of people and guns fell out of view of the system when they moved and didn’t inform the Firearms control bureaucracy by neglect, not knowing they were supposed to give their new address or just out of civil disobedience.
A lot of inherited guns may also have disappeared over decades for all sort of random or deliberate reasons: Forgotten , lost, stolen, hidden over multiple decades gives a very high error rate between where things are supposed to be and where they actually are: It’s a bit like putting a number on every grain of sand on a beach, after a while the tide and wind will have taken care of randomizing what was carefully catalogued.
In any case low balling the annual cost figures just makes it hard to believe,