During my formative years in suburban Nova Scotia, I sometimes ventured into the woods with my buddies, rifles and shotguns in hand, in search of wild game. We were terrible hunters—loud and conspicuous. Any success, sheer happenstance. Our many failures, well deserved. But it was fun, in a traditional Canadian sense.

Then on Dec. 6, 1989, a deranged misogynist named Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained semi-automatic rifle, slaughtered 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. In the tragedy’s wake, a wild-eyed Liberal MP from Toronto named Allan Rock, a grandstander of soapbox tradition, recklessly flung together those unrelated events—Lépine’s mass murder and my teenage hunting trips—to craft his national gun registry, which has tapped the wallets and rights of law-abiding gun owners for the past 15 years. “The only people in this country who should have guns,” Rock proclaimed, “are police officers and soldiers.”

Today, Rock is gone—turfed from office into the president’s chair at the University of Ottawa. His dream of a gun-free Canada festers within a stagnant bloated bureaucracy. Plagued by costs overruns and an impossible mandate, the registry’s promised price tag of $2 million (with an M) has ballooned to $2 billion (with a B).

In a gesture uncommon to the Harper regime, the Conservatives aim to relinquish federal power and kill the registry with a private members bill vote in Parliament Sept. 22. But it’s no slam dunk. Registry acolytes remain. For example. Last week via press release, Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu praised the registry and urged MPs to retain its operation.

Chu spoke for the department, and the Canadian Association of Chief’s of Police (CACP), a lobbying organization funded in part by CGI Group Inc., the major software supplier for—you guessed it—the national gun registry. Chu, who refused to be interviewed for this story, sits on the CACP board of directors. On its own, this obvious conflict of interest disqualifies Chu from impartial comment.

Nevertheless, in making his pro-registry argument, Chu presented several dubious cases of registry effectiveness in Vancouver and its ability to inform police about guns (in the hands and homes of citizens) when responding to calls from the public.

But according to SFU professor emeritus Gary Mauser, a fierce academic who spent more than two decades studying the link between gun laws and crime rates, Chu’s faith in the registry is ill-informed and downright dangerous to public and police officer safety. Due to criminal gun possession and registry scofflaws, says Mauser, only half of Canada’s estimated 12 to 15 million firearms are registered. “When a police officer goes to a person’s place of residence and he sees on the registry that there are no guns, he cannot assume that to be true.”

Outside the realm of academia, the gun registry divide—supporters versus opponents—is often defined by culture and class. Chu, a first-generation Chinese-Canadian and lifelong urbanite, appears detached from the experience of law-abiding gun owners in Canada. And like most forms of disdain, his attitude towards gun ownership seems born from ignorance.

Chu’s most specious pro-registry example involves multiple firearm ownership—a favourite scenario for anti-gun hyperbole. According to Chu’s press release, “police were advised of a situation where an individual had quite quickly accumulated over 57 firearms… a follow-up was conducted to ensure public safety and that the guns were purchased and stored for a legitimate purpose. Without the long gun registry, this intelligence could not have been confirmed.”

The press release does not specify whether the “individual” was a gun dealer or collector. It ignores the fact that there’s no law against owning 57 firearms, and most importantly, fails to indicate whether any criminal charges were laid. “That suggests their fears were completely unfounded,” says Mauser.

So why, apart from loyalty to CACP and its CGI benefactors, would Chu fudge and fear-monger to help save the national gun registry?

“It’s free,” says Mauser. “Taxpayers pay for it. It does not come out of the [VPD] budget.”

Yeah, probably. But I think Chu’s interested in more than dollars and cents. Like registry architect Allan Rock 15 years ago, Chu conflates gun ownership with crime and opposes all gun owners. Period.

As the police chief in a city stained with real crime and corruption, Chu should focus on the bad guys and let regular folks—who happen to own guns—live their lives in peace.

mhasiuk@vancourier.com