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The Gun Registry -- "Minority Report" without the precogs

The death of the four Mounties at the hands of a man with a high-powered rifle has raised new questions about the billion-dollar gun registry.

Maybe if we had precogs...

From the Toronto Star:

New questions are being asked about Canada's controversial and expensive gun registry, and why it didn't keep a high-calibre assault rifle out of the hands of a man who killed four Mounties in a cold-blooded ambush.

Despite the Firearms Act and its related programs -- designed to keep firearms from people who are likely to be a danger to themselves or to others -- local farmer Jim Roszko managed to obtain and keep the high-powered weapon, which he used Thursday to kill RCMP constables Peter Schiemann, Leo Johnston, Anthony Gordon and Brock Myrol before turning the gun on himself.

Not that most people needed to be reacquainted with this case.

Roszko -- a convicted child molester whom family and neighbours described as aggressive and in a lot of emotional pain -- was known by local residents and police to have guns hidden on his farm. In fact, he faced numerous firearms charges over the years, and in 1999 a bailiff who was to visit the Roszko farm was warned by RCMP to wear a bulletproof vest.

Critics say Roszko shouldn't have had weapons in the first place -- and, if the gun registry actually worked, wouldn't have had them.

I guess it means the registry doesn't work. Another billion flushed.

"Show me a perfect law," [RCMP spokesman Cpl. Wayne Oakes] said. "It's against the law to murder, yet we still have people being killed, almost daily."

And logic gets flushed too. With all due respect to the corporal, the two are not the same.

A law against murder doesn't cost a billion to implement. It doesn't attempt to prevent anything. It lists the punishment for a choice a person might make to kill another -- implicitly the severe punishment is hoped to deter that choice, but that is all.

The registry is an attempt to control the access to a legal product in the hope that by limiting the rights of a large number of people, a few within that group might have potential plans for mayhem foiled. But we'll never know how many, if any. Moreover, it assumes that those people likely to use guns for crime are going to submit to the registry regulations along with that large number of people I alluded to earlier.

Clearly that is not the case. The problem is that the registry is trying to prevent one type of crime by stepping back and trying to control a predecessor activity -- in this case, owning a gun. But many, if not most, people who want to own a gun are not planning to commit a crime, so such a law must affect a lot of law-abiding people caught in the net. Laws are traditionally aimed at the criminals only, and only after he has been identified by virtue of having carried out a crime. This new model of lawmaking says it is more efficient to prevent the crime in the first place by intercepting the criminal element one or two steps back from the actual crime.

A sort of Minority Report -- the movie that depicted a future in which the ability to predict future events (an ability restricted to three "precogs" or precognitives) was incorporated into a crime prevention program.

But unlike the movie, we don't have precogs. We can't know which gun owner is planning a crime. So we target all of them, at great expense, both in terms of money and of respect for individual rights.

And guess what? Like any piece of fiction, it simply doesn't work in real life.

The solution? I fear the Liberals and their allies will insist that the theory is sound. Maybe they just need to "step back" again -- trying to stop future crimes at the point guns are purchased isn't working.

How about the fact that most violent crimes are committed by men? Target all men with some sort of control law in order to catch the few that might commit a crime sometime in the future.

How about a step back again, and targeting the values people have? Get them when they're young and employ social engineering (nationalized daycare?) to make sure they are incapable of violent thought.

Makes me wish the Liberals had a precog or three just to stop them from considering this.

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Angry in the Great White North by Steve Janke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Based on a work at stevejanke.com.
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