Canada’s Billion-Dollar Gun Registry - Anything but Citizen Friendly

Pellet Gun-Wielding Man
Jailed in Toronto

After arriving home at 8 am from his graveyard shift, Tom Lacasse of Toronto decided to get in a little backyard target practice with a pellet gun he’d borrowed from a friend.

Realizing he might wake up his neighbors, Lacasse, 43, went to bed instead. According to an article in the Toronto Globe & Mail, Lacasse’s rest was interrupted when police banged on his door and hauled him away in handcuffs, charging him with pointing a firearm at a widow who lived next door and possessing a dangerous weapon.

The bakery deliveryman was held in Toronto’s Don Jail and denied bail. On the ninth day of his incarceration, a police review of the case revealed that his neighbor had said Lacasse, a man with no criminal record, had not pointed the gun at her and he was released.

Thousands of Canadian Bureaucrats
Track Down Duck Hunters, Farmers

Ezra Levant of the Calgary Sun writes, “Canada’s billion-dollar gun registry employs 1,800 bureaucrats, who spend their days tracking down duck hunters and farmers.”

Levant’s article points out a few shortcomings in the massive gun registry:

• The government admits it has registered 718,414 guns without serial numbers, which he says is about as useless as registering a vehicle as “a blue Ford Explorer.”

• For guns without serial numbers, the government issued stickers with serial numbers, apparently believing that criminals can be trusted not to peel them off.

• Nearly 223,000 guns were registered with the same make and serial number as other guns.

• Private details about every gun owner are put on a computer database called CPIC, a system that has been breached 221 times, according to the RCMP.

• In August of 2002 the gun registry sent a letter to Hulbert Orser demanding he register his guns. Orser has been dead since 1981.

• Some 304,000 people were allowed to register guns even though they didn’t have a license permitting them to own a gun.

• Despite the billion-dollar taxpayer subsidy, gun owners pay $279 for the required licenses, registration, photo ID and other costs to license each gun.