WFSA Current News - September, 2003 

September 25, 2003  

Misrecording of guns in registry
            The charges of ineffectiveness directed at gun registries in general have been further supported by recent developments in Canada . Canadian Alliance Member of Parliament Garry Breitkreuz has obtained records from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which show that there are very serious problems.
            The premise of registration is that all guns can be accounted for, and this has already proved impossible to achieve. When individual guns are in fact registered by law-abiding owners in keeping with legal requirements, there is still room for massive confusion. 101,835 guns have been reported by the police as being stolen since 1998. However, 250,305 firearms logged in the registry matched the serial numbers of these guns. Obviously, this is a duplication of 2.5 to one, and such an error rate makes the records of very doubtful value.
            An article by Tim Naumetz of the CanWest News Service appeared today in the National Post, saying that the buyers of the guns then registered them in good faith without any knowledge of their previously having been stolen. Garry Breitkreuz is quoted as saying: "The whole argument for the registry was that you wouldn't be able to register a stolen firearm and now you've got stolen firearms registered in the system.”
            It may be tempting to think that better individual practices inside a gun registry would diminish such errors, but it is an inherent part of firearm record-keeping that serial numbers are continually overlapping.

September 25, 2003

Disabled US hunters preparing for the season
            One of the common deficiencies of the mass media treatment of hunting is seen in the absence of information published about just who goes hunting. The world population of hunters numbers in the tens of millions, and crosses all cultures. It follows that a portion of them, as with any cross-section of the population, will have some sort of physical disability. Hunting to this social group is a vital part of their recreation.
            This week has seen media mention of two different groups of disabled hunters.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=2040&dept_id=232227&newsid=10223695&PAG=461&rfi=9 carries a September 25 story from GilesToday.com saying that there are 600,000 hunters in the United States alone who will go afield this year. The National Rifle Association has a Disabled Shooting Services Department which offers detailed advice to all participants in the shooting sports. This includes safety hints and other information on preparing and using wheelchairs to best effect in the outdoors.
            Similarly, the National Wild Turkey Federation has a subsidiary group which as a community service provides assistance to take disabled hunters into the field. A September 21 article in the Shreveport Times of Louisiana described the interest in the Wheelin’ Sportsmen’s annual hunt from people in three states.
            The shooting sports are such that in some circumstances they place the disabled at little or no disadvantage in comparison with the able-bodied. 

September 24, 2003

Swiss promote gun registration
            The Swiss Justice Minister, Ruth Metler, has made a statement in favour of universal gun registration.
            An article by Jon Dougherty, published in WorldNetDaily.com, has described it as a response to the multiple murder carried out two years ago by a madman wielding a military rifle outside the parliament building in Zug.
            The Minister is quoted as saying: "That's the reason why I have proposed creating a register which would have all the names of weapons in Switzerland". No suggestion is given as to why she believes a gun registry would alter the murder rate, or even be relevant in preventing murders such as the Zug shootings, either in Switzerland or anywhere else. Certainly, there is no evidence that registration has been an effective crime control measure anywhere it has been introduced in the world to date.
            There is a pattern that continues to be repeated: some officials in governments are prone to make the assumption that having records of the serial numbers on guns that are held lawfully will somehow prevent crime. The article also quotes Metler as suggesting it is “worrying” that Switzerland has an estimated 1.2 million lawfully owned guns. There is wide historical acceptance that private gun ownership saved untold lives through discouraging any invasion of Switzerland in World War Two. There is also no evidence that high lawful gun density in a society makes for more crime.
            With almost all men in Switzerland being required to do military training, and with automatic and semi-automatic arms being in private hands throughout the entire country, and considering that the country has long had an enviably low murder rate, it is remarkable that gun registration could be assumed to be some kind of end in itself, as though it has a self-evident advantage.
            The full article is available at http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34751 .