12/04/2012

Canadian Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau calls long-gun registry 'a failure'

This is a pretty amazing statement by Trudeau.
. . . "The long-gun registry, as it was, was a failure and I'm not going to resuscitate that," Trudeau said while visiting the DART Aerospace plant in Hawkesbury. 
"We will continue to look at ways of keeping our cities safe and making sure that we do address the concerns around domestic violence that happen right across the country, in rural as well as urban areas in which, unfortunately, guns do play a role." 
"But there are better ways of keeping us safe than that registry which is, has been removed," Trudeau said. 
The Liberal leadership hopeful made the comments after he was asked for his view on the now-defunct long-gun registry. 
"I grew up with long guns, rifles and shotguns," explained the son of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. 
"Yes, the RCMP guarding me had handguns and I got to play with them every now and then," said Trudeau, quickly adding that the RCMP was "very responsible" around him and his siblings. . . .  
Trudeau voted against the abolition of the federal long-gun registry. . . .
The registry cost a lot of money, but didn't solve any crimes.

From 2003 to 2009, there were 4,257 homicides in Canada, 1,314 of which were committed with firearms. Data provided last fall by the Library of Parliament reveals that the weapon was identified in fewer than a third of the homicides with firearms, and that about three-quarters of the identified weapons were not registered. Of the weapons that were registered, about half were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide. In just 62 cases — that is, only 4.7 percent of all firearm homicides — was the gun registered to the accused. As most homicides in Canada are not committed with a gun, the 62 cases correspond to only about 1 percent of all homicides.
To repeat, during these seven years, there were only 62 cases — nine a year — where it was even conceivable that registration made a difference. But apparently, the registry was not important even in those cases. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case.
The problem isn’t just with the long-gun registry. The data provided above cover all guns, including handguns. There is no evidence that, since the handgun registry was started in 1934, it has been important in solving a single homicide. . . .


 

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home