I can only agree that the information is quite inaccurate. Indeed, the premise of the former government about the numbers of long guns in the country.... You'll notice that over the years it kept on reducing its numbers for how many long guns were actually in the country in order to show that the compliance rate was increasing more and more. If you say at one point that there are 14 million long guns, and you have only one million registered, you obviously have a low compliance rate. But if you lower the number of long guns, which you saw the former government doing consistently-- and I don't know what number they eventually ended up with--you could then show a much higher compliance rate. So it doesn't give you any indication of how many long guns there actually are in this country.
What we can say with accuracy is that when we license individuals, we know those individuals are licensed owners and that they are the ones who are qualified to own and use firearms. That is a much better system, a much better tool, and more accurate than the long-gun registry, which we know is not utilized by criminals. That being said, criminals don't license themselves either. However, I think that licensing is a much better screen of individuals who may, for various reasons, want a firearm, but perhaps because of a medical or other condition should not own a firearm. We can have that discussion in a very appropriate way in the licensing process.
The registry doesn't assist in that respect.