More delays and people ignoring this waste of time and money--but this time there's talk of the police ignoring it:
In what has become a familiar refrain, the Canada Firearms Centre has once again quietly put off several gun regulations that were supposed to take effect this month.
Among the measures delayed until next year is a provision to have police forces across Canada register all their weapons - including seized guns - with the federal agency. New rules governing gun shows have been deferred until November 2006, while regulations that would force gun-makers to identify all firearms with internationally recognized markings won't come into force until the end of 2007.
The provisions were initially supposed to take effect last January, but were put off to Sept. 1. Now they've been deferred again.
A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan said the deferral is both to "ensure compliance and be responsive to the feedback" on the regulations from the public.
...
The latest delays indicate there are still many kinks in the system, said Conservative MP Peter MacKay.
"It's another example of the ineffective, overly bureaucratic nightmare that is the gun registry," MacKay said from Halifax.
"The government continues with this simultaneous face-saving, rear-end-covering exercise of trying to justify a very cumbersome, useless system."
MacKay, a former Crown prosecutor, insisted the government backed off because police forces would have ignored the registration demand.
"They've got far more important things to do."
The registry has become an easy target. The Liberals promised it would cost taxpayers just $2 million when they introduced it in 1995. But the price has skyrocketed past $1 billion and been the subject of scathing criticism from the federal auditor general.
Opponents claim tens of thousands of guns remain unregistered, and say the system punishes law-abiding farmers and sport hunters while doing nothing to deter illegal weapons from getting into the hands of criminals.
It's a losing issue. They should salvage the computers, lay off all the Canada Firearms Centre workers, and either spend the money saved on police and/or prisons or let the people use it to buy a good handgun and training to defend themselves and their families with. Registration of firearms and their owners is no more effective in reducing crime and no less abhorrent than registering Jews/blacks/homosexuals/etc.