From: "David M", [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20010119/442755.html Gun safety, indeed National Post The goal of Canada's half-billion dollar gun registry is public safety. By requiring gun owners to provide references and submit to a detailed background check, the logic goes, potential criminals will be weeded out. Toward that aim, the Firearms Act requires every gun owner to fill out a personal questionnaire: Have you ever been depressed? Do you have a drinking problem? How about an emotional problem? Have you ever been reported to a social services agency for a "conflict in your home or elsewhere?" Have you lost a job any time in the past two years? Have you had a "breakdown of a significant relationship?" Any "Yes" answer has to be explained. During the first two years of the gun registry's operation, the registry's 1,500 bureaucrats (of whom only about half actually process applications) handled an average of 18,000 applications per month -- about one application per case worker per business day. Such slow progress is understandable. If safety is the goal, then, obviously, one would expect that each application is carefully scrutinized. But for Anne McLellan, the Minister of Justice, the process was too slow. For each application the registry processed, three more piled up. By Jan. 1, more than one million applications, all dutifully filled out and with cheques attached, were sitting unopened in the gun registry's filing cabinets. Something had to give -- either Ottawa would have to hire thousands of extra paper-pushers, the Jan. 1 implementation of the law would have to be delayed or the time spent on background checks would have to be cut back. At first, Ms. McLellan chose the second option, pushing the deadline back to July 1. But even that six-month delay would only have cleared 110,000 more applications at the bureaucrats' one-a-day pace. So employees were ordered to speed things up. According to David Austin, the gun registry's spokesman, the same bureaucrats who averaged 18,000 files a month for two years have miraculously pumped through 600,000 files in the past month. The same case workers who had been spending a day on each form were now blazing through them in 10 minutes flat. How well does the accelerated system work? According to Brian Drader, the National Firearms Association's Manitoba director, none too well. As an experiment, he submitted an application, providing the names of two men charged with crimes -- including one man who allegedly threatened the Prime Minister -- as his character references. Mr. Drader received his licence. Mr. Austin says this assembly-line pace is only a temporary stop-gap to eliminate the backlog. Maybe so, but the registry will require no further information from applicants it has already processed. According to Mr. Austin, the 600,000 applications churned through since December are in the clear: No further background checks will be conducted. Though the gun registry has been unpopular in rural Canada and extraordinarily costly, Ms. McLellan always justified the project as a boon to public safety. Now that her day-long background checks have become 10-minute rubber-stamping sessions, and alleged criminals pass as character references, that argument has been debunked. One can only wonder what excuse she will use now. Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________________________________________________ T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01
