A Global News investigation has found dozens more misclassified firearms which might be deleted with the long gun registry.
Yesterday, Global News reported finding 361 handguns and three automatic weapons classified as if they were mainstream rifles or shotguns, which, all other things being equal, means that their data will be deleted.
Since that story appeared, we have found more than 120 weapons in the firearms registry which aren’t classified at all. They include 33 handguns – prohibited or restricted weapons, depending on barrel length – and 12 automatic weapons, which may or may not have been converted to semi-automatic fire.
“(Under Bill C-19) If there is a record relating to a firearm that is not prohibited or restricted, it needs to be destroyed,” Ottawa lawyer Solomon Friedman explains. “I think what this highlights more than anything is the level of inaccuracy in the registry in the first place: that you can have a Glock there in the data that has no class.”
However, after being provided with the erroneous data, the RCMP now says it will investigate and correct any errors before deleting the long gun database.
“The records pointed out by Global News had been flagged for follow up. Such records would not be destroyed if, after verification, they turn out to actually be restricted or prohibited firearms,” said spokesman Sgt. Greg Cox.
“The deletion of this data is a complex process, which includes sorting records of restricted and prohibited firearms from those of non-restricted firearms, so that the restricted and prohibited records are not destroyed. In some cases, owners of restricted and prohibited firearms have erroneously registered them as non-restricted. The CFP has ongoing data quality control procedures to find and flag these errors by firearm owners, and correct them.”
The new discoveries bring the total of restricted and prohibited weapons in line to be erroneously deleted with the long gun registry to 406. (Click here for an interactive list of the misclassified weapons.)
| HOW THE SYSTEM WORKSUntil April, Canada’s firearm registration system tracked three types of firearms:Non-restricted weapons are shotguns and rifles normally used by hunters and farmers. The database tracking these weapons, which legislation passed in April has ordered destroyed, is referred to as the “long-gun registry”.Restricted weapons mostly covers handguns with barrels over a given length. Prohibited weapon is a confusing term – a better one might be ‘strictly regulated.’ This category includes handguns with barrels under a given length and a small number of legally owned automatic weapons. Restricted and prohibited weapons will continue to be registered. Owners of any type of firearm must still be licenced. |
The new batch of firearms include two home-made Sten guns – simply designed British sub-machine guns produced in large numbers during the Second World War – 15 revolvers and 18 semi-automatic handguns. There is also an Austrian-made sub-machine gun described as ‘experimental’.
Automatic weapons and converted automatic weapons are both classed as prohibited weapons. (Legally, firearms in Canada must be categorized as non-restricted, restricted or prohibited. Bill C-19, possed into law in April, requires officials to delete information on firearms which are not classified as restricted or prohibited. These ‘non-restricted’ categorized weapons are form what is typically referred to as the long gun registry.)
Part of the root of the problem lay in the design of the registry, argues John Evers of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association:
“They wrote software which made it possible to make a simple mouse-click error. The system allowed you to register a handgun as non-restricted. Any good software engineer would have made sure that can’t happen – that once you select ‘handgun’ you can’t select ‘non-restricted,’ but the system let them do it.”
“We were not all that co-operative,” Evers says of some gun owners’ response to the registry process. “I know several people who put down everything as unknown – unknown make, unknown serial number, because the law said that if you made an error, you were liable for those errors. So to be safe, they said they didn’t know. A lot of my guns are ‘unknown make/unknown model’ as a protest against what they are trying to do.”
A redacted copy of the national firearms database, including the doomed long gun data, was released to Global News under access-to-information laws in May.
“These facts should give the government of so called ‘law and order’ serious reasons to review those facts very carefully before destroying all data from the long gun registry,” said Opposition justice critic Françoise Boivin. “First to protect all good law abiding Canadian citizens who registered their guns and second in the name of basic public security.”
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the new findings are another reason the registry needed to be scrapped.
“This is further proof that the long-gun registry’s data is inaccurate and that the registry itself is wasteful and ineffective,” said Toews. “We will ensure that law-abiding firearms owners do not pay for any administrative mistakes committed by Firearms Centre bureaucracy.”
The long gun registry outside Quebec has not yet actually been deleted, though police no longer have access to it.
STRAY HANDGUNS AND AUTOMATIC WEAPONS
Note the class in each case – it should be “restricted” or “prohibited”.
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