The good, bad and bizarre on new gun laws

THEY ARE MEDDLING WITH A MODEL THAT WORKS, JUST TO SAY THEY DID.

Eternally convinced that Canada’ s gun laws are meant for revising, the Liberals, 25 years after they created the notorious imbroglio known as the longgun registry, have decided to take another crack at it. They appear to have largely learned their lesson not to be ridiculously out of touch with the reality of responsible gun ownership. But not entirely. Some of the new rules are fine. Some are not. Some are just bizarre. Canada’s law- abiding gun owners still don’t trust the Liberals’ intentions, and there are reminders here as to why.

Altering the background checks that would- be gun licence holders ( or current holders renewing their licences) must undergo is a suggestion most people will live with. Under the current rules, the past five years are subject to a background check; under the proposed legislation, the checks would stretch back for the applicant’s lifetime. Looking back further than five years is hardly unreasonable.

What is, is the choice to l eave the RCMP entirely responsible for classifying guns into the three categories established by the Fire- arms Act, letting police decide which firearms will be subject to various levels of oversight and control.

Guns in Canada can be non- restricted ( most rifles and shotguns), restricted ( most handguns and some rifles) or prohibited ( some handguns and rifles the government has deemed particularly dangerous, often with weak reasoning). Most gun licences in Canada cover only non- restricted guns; only a very few Canadians, who previously owned prohibited firearms, are permitted to possess a grandfathered-in prohibited licence. Changing a gun’s classification can therefore make it, with the stroke of a pen, much harder to access, even for valid licence holders. This reeks of a government trying to distance itself from public anger over decisions regarding firearms re classifications (“Don’t blame us, the RCMP changed the rules!”) What other decisions regarding l aw enforcement regulations, not just operational execution, do the Liberals think should be left entirely in the hands of police? Our system relies on civilian oversight over police for a reason.

And then, there are changes that can only be considered bizarre. The Liberals will partially bring back a document known as an Authorization to Transport, or ATT, which owners of restricted guns will need before transporting their gun, in a secured container, to a legitimate gun show for display and/or sale, or to a gunsmith’s shop for maintenance. The ATT had been largely eliminated by the previous Conservative government, and made a condition of a valid restricted firearms licence. The Liberals are bringing it back in part ( trips to shooting ranges will still be permitted without a separate ATT) for no valid public safety reason at all. It’s clearly just something they will claim as evidence of their efforts to tighten up gun controls. Technically, that’s true. But it is a tighter control that serves no end except that of Liberal political fortunes, and not enhanced public safety.

Yes, it could have been worse. It was expected to be worse. The Liberals have done much worse before. T heir as t onishingly e xpensive long- gun registry, despite massive costs and t rouble f or gun owners, never properly functioned. Its scrapping produced no detectable rise in the level of number of homicides committed with long guns. The average annual number of homicides with rifle or shotgun for the full 10 years before the long- gun registry was scrapped was 37.3. The average annual number of homicides with rifle or shotgun for the first four years since it was scrapped, all of the figures so far available, is 37.75.

And when the long- gun registry was established, this is the party that swore up and down that it was not a precursor to bans and confiscations, and t hen, in 2005, proposed exactly that. Down in the polls, then prime minister Paul Martin proposed a total ban on handguns, which would have been easily accomplished using the data that Canadians were told would not be used for precisely that.

So while these proposed l egislative tweaks are so far muted, Canadian gun owners have been burned repeatedly by this party, and aren’t likely to believe the Liberals don’t have a hidden agenda in store somewhere. So far, gun- control proponents are clearly unhappy with these small regulatory tweaks and the addition of a few extra pieces of paperwork before one takes their Glock in for a tune-up.

The trouble is the Liberals’ incoherent position on guns. The party routinely shows itself disconnected from rural interests, but Liberals do know that gun control plays well with their urban base. They likely also can’t ignore the fact that gun crime is generally rare in Canada and that our system of gun control works well. So, for political reasons alone, they are back to meddling with a model that works, just to say they did. It’s the latest example of this government’s consistent problem with delivering on campaign promises that were made for reasons other than good policy. As with their embarrassing spectacle over electoral reform, the Liberals this week succeeded in proving with gun laws that there are a lot of existing laws that simply don’t need a progressive Liberal fix.