Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, and fellow panellists. I appreciate this opportunity to appear before you.
I am Gary Mauser, professor emeritus, SFU. I am here as an individual criminologist to present facts, not myths. I will use my time to highlight a few issues referred to in the longer written brief that I have provided to the clerk.
For the past 25 years as an academic criminologist, I have focused on evaluating firearms legislation. The government is to be congratulated for proposing that the long-gun registry be eliminated. When a government program has failed to meet its goals, it should be shut down rather than permitted to drain funds for no good reason.
In my brief address, I will hit four points. First, responsible gun owners are less likely to be accused of homicide than other Canadians. Second, the police have not been able to demonstrate the value of the long-gun registry. Third, the long-gun registry has not been effective in reducing homicide. Fourth, the data in the long-gun registry are of such poor quality that they should be destroyed.
My first point is that law-abiding gun owners are less likely to be accused of homicide than other Canadians. This should not surprise. Firearms owners have been screened for criminal records since 1979, and it has been illegal since 1992 for people with a violent record to own a firearm.
Gun owners may be compared with other Canadians by calculating homicide rates per 100,000 people. Based on a special request from Statistics Canada, I calculated that licensed gun owners had a homicide rate of 0.6 persons per 100,000 licensed gun owners, while over the same time period there was an average national homicide rate of 1.85 per 100,000 people; thus, Canadians who do not have a firearms licence are roughly three times more likely to commit murder than those who do.
Despite these facts, the RCMP budgets more than $20 million annually for the long-gun registry.
The second point is that the police have not been able to demonstrate the value of the long-gun registry. Scrapping the registry could not appreciably compromise law enforcement's ability to trace firearms. Statistics show that the police recover registered long guns in exceptionally few homicides.
During the eight years from 2003 to 2010, there were 4,811 homicides, and 1,485 of those involved firearms. Data provided by Statistics Canada reveal that only 135 of these guns were registered. In just 73 cases, that is, fewer than 5% of all firearm homicides, was the gun registered to the accused, and some of those, of course, may be innocent. Only 45 of these 73 cases involved long guns--fewer than 1% of all homicides. The long-gun registry could not, therefore, significantly compromise law enforcement's ability to trace firearms.
The police have not been able to show that they have solved a single murder by tracing a firearm using the long-gun registry. Nor has the long-gun registry proved useful in solving police killings. Since 1961, 123 police have been shot and killed. Only one of these murders involved a registered long gun, and it did not belong to the murderer. It is a truism that the most dangerous criminals have not registered their firearms. Unsurprisingly, serving police officers say the registry is not useful to them.
Worse, the long-gun registry has reduced the effectiveness of the police by driving a wedge between them and responsible citizens who own firearms.
My third point is that the long-gun registry has not been effective in reducing homicide rates. There is no convincing evidence that the registry has reduced criminal violence. Not a single refereed academic study by criminologists or economists has found a significant benefit from the gun laws.
Two examples illustrate this: the homicide rate fell faster before long guns were required to be registered, and the homicide rate fell faster in the U.S. than in Canada over the same time period of 1991 to 2010. Needless to say, the U.S. did not share Canada's gun laws. Also, the rate of multiple murders has not changed since the long-gun registry began.
The fourth point is that the data in the long-gun registry are of such poor quality that they should be destroyed. The many errors and omissions in the long-gun registry vitiate its utility for police and courts. The Auditor General twice found that the RCMP could not rely upon the registry on account of the large number of errors and omissions.
In closing, I wish to thank you for your attention and leave you with a few thoughts.
The long-gun registry is misdirected because it focuses on law-abiding citizens rather than violent criminals. To do their job, police require the support of those they police. Ending the registry will help to heal the rupture between the police and responsible citizens. I urge that BillC-19 become law and the data in the long-gun registry be destroyed.
By the way, there is clearly precedent for destroying such data. During World War II, all guns, including long guns, were registered. After the war, this information was discarded in the trash bin as no longer of value or utility.
Thank you.