Death of a Long-Gun Registry :: 02/21/2012

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday . Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers' time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.

Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.

Nice logic, but reality never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene, and when they are left at the scene, they have not been registered - criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that's registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered crime guns are left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.

By John R. Lott Jr. & Gary Mauser

February 20, 2012 4:00 A.M.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291304/death-long-gun-registry-john-r-lott-jr