Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Well, if it's going to pass--obviously there are more members on that side than there are on this side--I would hope that we would then bring in experts. I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm not into hypotheticals, either; I've worked in that field. I was a police chief when this was brought in. In my family, it's kind of the business--it's a son, it's a son-in-law, it's a nephew.
What you people are talking about is not about the registry. You're talking about gun control. The registry does not provide control. The control for firearms is Bill C-17. That's the safe handling, the safe storage, and the need to get an FAC. This legislation will not eliminate licensing.
The difficulty with this long gun registry is that it's fraught with errors within, first off; people are now criminals by nature of not having registered their firearms. All it does is give you some indication of long guns in a house. We already know that the danger is handguns.
Mr. Ménard talked about sawing off rifles, and shotguns. One of the reasons you saw off a shotgun is that you can't find a pistol that fires shotgun shells. That's one of the reasons for that.
When Bill C-17 came in, I would say to you that not every gun owner was particularly happy. Probably the vast majority was not pleased about the safe handling and the safe storage, where you had to put your ammunition in a different place from the firearms, where you had to get an FAC. But over time they certainly learned that this was one of the big factors in stopping accidental deaths, especially in homes where children could come across firearms that were loaded, and so on and so forth.
The other part about all of this is that our problem has always been handguns. You have used some numbers. I think you've used them mistakenly, and attributed what you see as a decline in homicides to the gun registry itself. In actual fact, I would say to you, probably the bigger reduction in that was the need for FACs and safe handling and safe storage.
We continue to see domestic homicides with firearms, with any number of weapons, and other homicides perpetrated by individuals who use weapons at hand, whether they're knives or hammers; in one case it was a toaster. Weapons don't have to be firearms, as you well understand.
To attribute reducing crime to the long gun registry is a big step, because it does nothing about reducing crime. It may have had the non-intended consequence of some people having their guns disposed of because they weren't going to go through the process of registering them, but beyond that, that was probably the limit. And those people are now finished. Those were older people who had their guns and for whatever reason decided they weren't going to register the long guns.
I would like to draw this to your attention. Certainly I'm happy to share this with you. This was an inquiry of the ministry done October 13, 2004.
Mr. Ménard, I think you would be interested in this.
It says:
Trends in crime statistics can be influenced by many factors including socio-demographic and economic changes, legislative and program changes and changes in police practices. The specific impact of the firearms program or the firearms registry cannot be isolated from that of other factors.
I'll present this to the clerk. That was in bold print from the ministry.
So I understand where you're coming from, but I think you've drawn conclusions from things that may or may not have impacted from this. To carry on the system when we can better use the resources, whether it's in actual dollars or in people operating a system....
Ms. Kadis mentioned the hits on the system. I've talked to front line police officers, and by and large those hits are automatic links in CPIC queries. You can set up your CPIC system, or your own computer system--some departments do--such that if they run a “10-28”, which is a vehicle registration check, when the name of the registered owner comes back, it also queries the firearms registry.
Make no mistake, 6,500 queries a day are not being made to the firearms registry to determine firearms. The vast majority, and I would say to you that almost all of them, are made because they're automatic links into the system.
The fact that you've run a car and found the registered owner's name...and the fact that the individual has firearms in his home means nothing to you. You're not interested in his home. If you ever, for one minute, walked up to a house and wanted to trust that information about whether or not there were firearms in that house, because you'd checked the registry, you'd end up with dead police officers.
They don't trust it, and they can't trust it. That's not because there's something necessarily inherently wrong with it, but you don't know that there are firearms there or not anyway. The individual who is most likely to use a firearm would have the firearm there because they'd stolen it for whatever means.
So the firearms are not going to be registered. It doesn't add to safety--of my son or my son-in-law or my nephew--and for that reason alone, I think we could use those resources in something else.
If you people are intent on supporting this motion, then I say to you, at the same time, it's time we invited people in here from both sides of the spectrum to give us a view of really what the system does or doesn't do. I suggest to you that it does less than you may have been led to believe.