Rahm Wants Handgun Registry

Stupidity in human form.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel today said he wants state lawmakers to approve a statewide handgun registry.  …

Rep. Brandon Phelps, who has championed efforts to pass a concealed weapons bill in Illinois, said the mayor’s office called him Thursday morning to let him know the registration proposal would be introduced.

“Number 1,  my first response was I don’t know why you’re trying to do this statewide because we don’t want your policies on us downstate,” said Phelps, a Southern Illinois Democrat from Harrisburg. “Number. 2, it’s never going to work. They’re trying to go after criminals. They’re never going to register their guns. They won’t pay the fee. “

Phelps called Emanuel’s initiative a “slap in the face of every law-abiding gun owner.”

via Chicago Tribune.com.

It’s been shown time and time again that gun registries simply do not work.  The greatest national experience was Canada’s long gun registry.

Department of Justice reported to Parliament that the system would cost $119 million to implement, and that the income generated fromlicensingfees would be $117 million. This gives a net cost of $2 million. At the time of the 2002 audit, the revised estimates from the Department of Justice were that the cost of the program would be more than $1 billion by 2004/05 and that the income from licence fees in the same period would be $140 million.^[6]

In February 2004, documents obtained by Zone Libre of Télévision de Radio-Canada suggest that the gun registry has cost around $2 billion so far.

So we know that a registry is crazy expensive and becomes another government boondoggle.

Well, maybe it’s still worthwhile because it really reduces crime.

Former Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino (who was opposed to the gun registry) stated in a press release in 2003:

We have an ongoing gun crisis including firearms-related homicides lately in Toronto, and a law registering firearms has neither deterred these crimes nor helped us solve any of them. None of the guns we know to have been used were registered, although we believe that more than half of them were smuggled into Canada from the United States. The firearms registry is long on philosophy and short on practical results considering the money could be more effectively used for security against terrorism as well as a host of other public safety initiatives.”

Well ok, maybe he was really really biased.  Perhaps other police really thought the registry was a great idea?

In April 2011, a survey was conducted by the Edmonton Police Association. Its members voted 81 percent in favour of scrapping the long-gun registry.

Well, at least law abiding citizens who do register their guns will know that their data is safe right?

John Hicks, an Orillia-area computer consultant, and webmaster for the Canada Firearms Centre, has said that anyone with a home computer could have easily accessed names, addresses and detailed shopping lists (including make, model and serial number) of registered guns belonging to licenced firearms owners. Hicks told the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) that “During my tenure as the CFC webmaster I duly informed management that the website that interfaced to the firearms registry was flawed. It took some $15 million to develop and I broke inside into it within 30 minutes.”

The Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters questioned the security of the gun registry after a home invasion that seemed to target a licenced gun collector. The OFAH argues that, in the wrong hands, a database detailing the whereabouts of every legally-owned firearm in Canada is a potential shopping list for criminals.

Given that any handgun registry would likely include all of the guns owned by police officers (& county sheriffs, state troopers, etc.) means that a whole big batch of government bureaucrats and anyone who wants to hack into the database would have the name, address, and list of owned handguns of everyone law enforcement officer in the state.

This could be the dumbest idea from the Rahmfather yet.