Gun Registry Taxation in Canada

There are those who may counter that the law provides more safety to police officers.  Study after study has proven this to be a complete falsehood.  No less fatalities occur to the police as a result of a gun registry and less than a five percent increase in pressing a charge results.   The argument that gun registry makes a police officer’s job safer because a firearms registry would let police know which houses have firearms in them is built on a premise that the system they are using is accurate and error free.  By their own admission, the RCMP’s Registrar of Firearms stated that they were experiencing virtually a 100% error rate. Another report prepared by the consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Dept. of Justice estimated a 20% error rate. The Minister of Justice estimated a 50% error rate. If you were a police officer, would you rely on a computer system with that kind of error rate to tell you whether the house you were called to did or did not have guns in it? 

Finally, and most importantly, you as our government are making a serious mistake in targeting honest, responsible Canadians in the agriculture sector of our society by making them a part of a problem they were never a part of in the first place, that is the violent crime problem in Canada. The Commissioner of the RCMP even said so in a letter to the Department of Justice that out 88,162 actual violent crimes in one year, only 73 of these offences, or 0.08 per cent, involved firearms.  Statistics Canada reported in Canadian Crime Statistics that there were a total of 291,437 crimes of violence, of this total, there were 121,291 violent incidents where weapons were involved but only 6,375, or just 2.2%, that involved firearms.

So if farmers aren’t the problem, why tax them when they require guns to maintain their farms against coyotes and other predators?

Police need more human resources and effective crime fighting tools. Unfortunately, taxing farmers for revenue to a system that is not working isn’t one of those tools. Taxation against farmers should be seriously questioned in a court of law with the end result in mind of having it scrapped immediately.