Firearms registration would be worthless

New Zealand tried it before, and it didn’t work then. It won’t work now, argues

When people suggest that all firearms in New Zealand should be registered

Mar 5), they leave out one important word. ‘‘Again’’. This country had registration and discarded it. Because it was 66 per cent inaccurate and completely worthless.

Canada has just dumped its system, due to it being billions of dollars over budget and delivering nothing useful.

I have just put several handguns in the upcoming Antique Arms auction. This necessitated acquiring permits to change the registered ownership. Sure enough, the police records were wrong. Again.

This despite only just having had two audits of my small collection in the previous year. Those records were inaccurate. As the police list has been every time I renew my firearms licence.

If you attend any collectors’ meeting and ask, ‘‘Hands up if your records were inaccurate at your last check’’, it will look like a hairy forest. Records often remain uncorrected for decades.

Police have confirmed to me that they are aware of serious issues with their current system. They have also confirmed that they have never performed an audit of their records. At any level. Ever.

They have also informed me they are ‘‘too busy’’ to do this now.

Right. So they are incapable of tracking several thousand restricted firearms now, but think they can handle the better part of two million longarms? Cue the Tui ad.

One joker in Canada illustrated the farce of the system there by registering a soldering gun. Countless other records were duplicates. Others recorded the model, rather than the serial number. Worse, greater numbers were recorded as the calibre. Shooters were frustrated to learn that many stolen guns had been reregistered without detection.

Proponents of such a system will boast of the number of times the records are ‘‘accessed’’ by police. That is very different to producing a result. The Canadian government has yet to prove that its registration system has been a contributing factor in any investigation.

Proponents also point to cars and dogs being registered. They leave out that we have almost 12,000 dog bites a year. Or that 20,000 cars are reported stolen each year, with insurance companies guessing at twice that number.

Criminals don’t register firearms. They also grind off the serial numbers of the guns they steal or smuggle. So, a system costing hundreds of millions of tax dollars is easily undone within seconds with a stolen grinder.

Another concern is the number of cases of corrupt or incompetent police giving gangs a shopping list of theft victims. Recently, the details of 30,000 British shooters were accidentally given to a marketing agency.

Massive non-compliance with registration laws also leads to firearms going underground, where criminals have even greater access to them. Not long ago, only 50,000 of Britain’s estimated 300,000 shotguns were registered as demanded.

The dirtiest trick of the gun control debate is to paint New Zealand’s shooters as ‘‘other’’; as being outside the community, with our selfish interests in opposition to the public good. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are a quarter of a million licensed firearm owners. When you include our friends and families, our loved ones and our workmates, we the community.

We want a safe society and have compromised in countless ways over many decades to achieve this. The only thing that we won’t compromise with is stupidity. With ideas that have been proven to fail in every nation in which they were tried. Including our own.

The registration of firearms is one of those stupid ideas. Let it go.