Registers lower gun crime
The gun lobby has opposed gun registers for the last three decades. So, we at Gun Control NZ looked at recent evidence from Canada, Australia and the European Union. In Europe and Australia (combined population 537 million), gun registration has been a success. In Canada (population 38m), cost overruns and mass resistance from gun owners forced the cancellation of their scheme.
Registration makes each firearm owner personally responsible for every weapon they own. New Zealand has had a laidback gun culture. While safety has improved, many owners have been too relaxed about security. When police looked at stolen firearm reports, they found that in more than 60 per cent of cases, the owners were not complying with basic security requirements. Nearly a third of the stolen guns were left unattended in vehicles. Most of the cars had been left unlocked, some with the keys inside!
Almost every black-market gun in New Zealand was once a legal gun. People with firearms licences buy guns for the unlicensed. In 2014, a licensed firearms owner was jailed for six years for selling 72 firearms to people without licences.
Many illegal firearms are stolen from licensed owners. We also suspect that thefts of weapons are sometimes not reported if the owner hadn’t stored them correctly.
Registration creates much stronger incentives for licensed firearms owners to store their weapons correctly, report thefts, and not lend or sell their weapons to unlicensed people.
The gun lobby loves to focus on gangs, with the spectre of patched gang members terrorising everyone with their illegal weapons. Only about a third of firearms homicides are connected to criminal gangs involved in organised crime such as drug dealing.
But gun registers can reduce the ability for career criminals to access guns. Professional criminals are much less likely to steal weapons if they know that a register could link them to the theft.
The introduction of firearms registration in the EU has been credited with making it more difficult for criminals to access firearms.
The abolition of the Canadian register in 2012 provides an opportunity to study some of the effects of registration. Statistics Canada observed that ‘‘firearm-related violent crime declined 33 per cent from 2009 to 2013, reaching its lowest point in recent years. The downward trend stopped in 2013 and, since then, it has gone up 42 per cent’’. Break-ins, where the intent was to steal a firearm, have sharply increased, from 743 in 2013 (2.8 per 100,000 population) to 1116 in 2016 (4.0 per 100,000 population).
Gun registers provide police with useful information for their day-to-day operations. The Canadian Police resisted the destruction of their gun register because it was helping them to prevent and solve crimes. It also helped to support police officer safety. In 2010, the Canadians found that nearly 40 per cent of firearms being recovered from crime scenes were registered and could be traced.
There are many examples where registration in Canada improved public safety. These include supporting family members to remove firearms from suicidal relatives and recovering nine guns from someone who had threatened to shoot a coworker.
Gun registers are useful in preventing and solving crimes. But are they cost-effective? An evaluation of the European registers concluded that the costs were reasonable in light of the benefits that were generated.
A Canadian evaluation concluded that ‘‘the Canadian Firearms Program is cost-effective in reducing firearms-related crime and promoting public safety through universal licensing of firearms owners and registration of firearms in Canada’’.
The Canadian government disestablished the registration scheme in 2012. This decision was highly partisan and largely justified on the basis of substantial cost-overruns from the project.
The Canadian Firearms Program cost taxpayers more than 500 times its original estimate over the first 10 years, up from $2m to over $1b. However, the $1b price tag was mistakenly reported in the media as just the cost of gun registration, rather than the cost of all the new firearm laws. It was not until 2009 that the annual cost of the registry was reported. It was estimated that the operating costs in 2008-09 were between $1.195m and $4.03m.
So why did the Canadian registration system cost so much? A number of factors drove the high costs, including paper-based records, federal-state co-ordination problems, project delays and the complications of setting up a new administrative agency.
Most of these factors are unlikely to apply in New Zealand. Significantly, IT systems have improved since the 1990s and databases have become easier and cheaper to implement. The Government is proposing a slow introduction of the register to reduce costs and increase compliance by gun owners.
Gun Control NZ receives many messages from gun owners telling us why we’re completely wrong on the semi-automatic ban. But they often concede that a register is a sensible measure to improve firearms safety and reduce criminal offending.
We won’t see the benefits of a register overnight but they will happen if we stay the course and implement a register properly.
Philippa Yasbek is a co-founder of Gun Control NZ and has a background in legislation change. Jeff Loan is a senior public policy consultant with experience designing and evaluating policy programmes.