The National Firearms Association, a Canadian gun owners' group, has a slogan: "registration means confiscation." That's a cynical take on the law, some might say, but appropriate for a country where the government recently banned short-barreled, small-caliber pistols — years after they'd been subjected to registration with all due assurance that the things would remain legal. So you can imagine how Canadian gun owners take to C-68, a law that requires them to apply for licenses and register each and every firearm that they own. Pay attention; the Canadian experience holds some nasty lessons for residents of the balmy states south of the border.

Under C-68, gun owners of the north need to get a license by January 1, 2001. The new licenses replace old Firearms Acquisition Certificates, come coupled with a mandatory Firearms Safety Course, and, of course, have the effect of tagging and tracking all gun owners for easy identification under a bossy, intrusive parliamentary majority to be named later. Just to make sure, though, that no wood and metal devices prone to making loud noises slip through the net, all individual guns are supposed to be registered by January 1, 2003 (each registration comes with its own certificate, suitable for framing and showing off at parties).

The reaction

Canadian gun owners, by and large, don't seem terribly pleased by the new rules. Reform MP Garry Breitkreuz, who opposes the new gun restrictions, reportedly has a box full of registration forms scrawled with the word "never" that have been sent to him by folks across Canada. Individually and in organized fashion, many Canadians simply don't intend to obey a law that, if historical precedent is followed, will work out as the equivalent of handing a checklist of electronic goodies, jewelry, and loose change to a burglar.

Provincial governments representing a majority of Canadians are suing to have the law overturned. Of Canada's major, national political parties — Reform, Progressive Conservative, New Democrat, and Liberal — only the ruling Liberal Party is backing the registry (The Bloc Quebecois is a single-province party that, when not trumpeting the glories of a future Republic of Quebec, tends to an annoying we-know-what's-good-for-you-ism).

Blessed bureaucracy

Even politicians who aren't much worried about future governments using registration lists to satisfy sticky-fingered urges have reason to be concerned. The business of registering the nation's guns is going very slowly and very expensively. As the Canadian Taxpayers Federation puts it, "[b]y the time the federal government finishes the job of registering firearms, they may be dealing with phaser guns and light sabers." How's that? Well, to meet the legal deadline, the Canadian Firearms Centre needs to issue at least 7,300 permits per day. It's apparently averaging about 360 during the course of a government workday.

Whoops. Somebody must have set the Department of Motor Vehicles to the job.

And those are an expensive 360 guns per day. According to the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action, gun registrations are running C$19,096 each, with licenses at C$26,066 per person. The National Post has complained that "two successive Liberal justice ministers have plowed Ottawa's crime-fighting resources into this gun registry, aimed not at urban criminals but at law-abiding, rural Canadians," resulting in bare-bones resources for the famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police and real crime-fighting efforts. The paper continued, saying that "gun registries have no effect on crime — other than fostering it by diverting resources away from real police work."

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Those starved Mounties have even more reason to be ticked off. Advocates of C-68 inflated the RCMP's crime statistics by ninefold in order to come up with a gun crime rate that might persuade fence-sitting legislators. According to the Edmonton Journal, "[i]n 1993, the RCMP investigated no more than 73 violent crimes committed with a gun. Throughout the vast tracts of Canada policed by the Mounties, there had been just 73 firearms murders, attempted murders, muggings, assaults and hold-ups." This number somehow mutated into over 600 in presentations to parliament. RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray actively tried to get gun control advocates to stop fibbing about his statistics, but had as much luck as the high school chess club president trying to get a prom date.

So now Canadians are saddled with a fraudulently peddled, intrusive registration scheme that threatens to follow its antecedents by mutating into a confiscation plan and is moderated only by comical bureaucratic inefficiency and expense. Clearly, the Canadians should thank their lucky stars for that touch of Gallic governing know-how.

Lessons for the States

Americans like to ignore their neighbors to the north unless there's a hockey game on the tube, but a peek across the border is often a valuable lesson in truly idiotic public policy (yes, it does work both way — and we'll discuss that in a column on marijuana laws).

In a way, the warning posed by the experience to the north comes late. Californians have already been suckered into registering semi-automatic rifles with the promise that registration would be the end of the matter; they've now been ordered to cough up those rifles to the friendly local police. You know, the folks with those non-threatening registration lists. Residents of New York's rotten apple faced precisely the same situation just a few years earlier. And fibs? Well, the White House has been touting the success of the Brady Law in stopping evil-doers from acquiring firearms, but the federal government's own General Accounting Office had to admit that "any individual with an outstanding misdemeanor warrant is considered to be a fugitive from justice." Even better, according to the GAO, "in three jurisdictions in Texas, application forms being sent to wrong law enforcement agencies was a primary factor causing high denial rates."

The Indiana State Police caught the feds out-and-out lying that background checks blocked 1,085 would-be pistol packers in Indiana when the actual number was only 82.

And, unlike their colleagues to the north, American police agencies are anything but underfunded. The Mounties may be weak with hunger for the sustenance diverted to the gun registration program, but American law enforcers have plenty of toys and a proven willingness to play rough, as recent headlines about lethal police raids and scholarly reports about militarized police departments will attest. A national gun registration program might be just another excuse to kick in a few doors at 2am. (Trick or treat! And somehow, it's a trick every time).

So cast your eyes north and wish the Canadians successful resistance and continued bureaucratic inertia. If they can beat the scheme, gun registration might look a bit less attractive to American busybodies. If they can't... Well, maybe they'll ship a few bureaucrats south to teach American gun cops about efficiency.