"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.-William Pitt, British prime-minister (1759-1806)

With the resumption of Parliament the long maligned long gun registry will (maybe) meet its Waterloo. As an an example of what happens when ideology engages in sacrilegious acts with party politics the long gun registry has no equal in Canadian politics. Politicians preyed on urban dwelling Canadians frightened by what they saw on the television about crime in the US. Our police chiefs (elected to run police forces and not set policy) opined that knowledge of whether a firearm was in a residence would make a police officers jobs safer. And to top it all off that holy grail of the anti-gun crowd - The Montreal Massacre was lite once more into a blazing fervour! Huzzah said the masses - we will prove to the world how civilized we are by supporting the "necessity" of long gun control (the handguns everyone is afraid of have been strictly controlled and registered for years - except by the actual bad people of course).

So the government of the day(s)announced they had a plan - why this thing will cost a mere 100M$ to set up and pay for itself with "user fees" (or as I like to call this stuff taxes"). Contracts were awarded, people hired, politicians celebrated! A 100M$ would insure that we would know for sure if a farmer in Saskatchewan had a .410 coach gun tucked away to clear out the varmints’ in his barn because (here it comes) he will TELL us. This simple (and erroneous) assumption began the long, slow and phenomenally expensive LGR debacle. Why you ask, well here’s a couple of reasons – that farmer in Saskatchewan, that hunter in Quebec, that target shooter in Metcalfe – we all wondered how exactly the registry was going to protect anyone. After all it wasn’t like criminals were going to meekly fill in the forms and tell Police what they had; the LGR was “targeted” towards the non-criminal members of society. When this point was raised it was shouted down by Police Chiefs with the “knowledge is power” argument. Well I am not a police officer but I’m pretty sure rule #1 is to assume that ANY situation is dangerous and to conduct yourself accordingly (regardless of what the LGR says or doesn't say).

So One (1) Billion dollars later we have a long gun registry that tracks the firearms of all Canadians.  What happened of course is that the government (in a desperate attempt to get people to use it) caved on the user fees.  For One (1) Billion dollars we have now a reasonable competent system in place.  However what we don't have in place is increased public safety from criminals nor do are our brave police officers any safer than they were before.  What could we done with One (1) Billion dollars? Well we could have hired so many police officers that you couldn’t walk three steps without tripping over one. For One (1) Billion dollars we could of built more prisons where the message of “you use a gun in a crime and you do serious time” would be delivered one day at a time.

Any "necessity" born of Politics is predestined to fail everyone except those who take credit for the idea.  Such is the case of the LGR - may it rest in peace.