Off Target (essay)

Off Target is the title of an essay written by Dr. John Dixon, Canadian philosopher and hunter living in the country's province of British Columbia. Through 1991 and 92, he served as senior advisor to John Tait, the Progressive Conservative Deputy Minister of Justice at the time. The text of the essay is provided below (added emphasis does not exist in the original):

Essay

It is now widely understood that the government's gun control policy is a fiscal and administrative debacle. Its costs have reached levels that rival core services like national defence and health, and it doesn't work. What is not so widely understood is that the policy was never designed to control guns. It was designed to control Kim Campbell.

When Campbell was enjoying her brief season of success in her bid for re-election in the Summer campaign of 1993, Mr. Chretien was kept busy reassuring what he called the "Nervous Nellies" in his caucus. Campbell's star, he promised, would soon fall. One of the key elements of the Liberal plan to bring her down was a scheme to discredit her most considerable accomplishment as Minister of Justice, which was a tremendously ambitious package^{What package was that?} of gun control measures.

Those measures -- enacted in the wake of the Montreal Massacre - included new requirements for the training and certification of target shooters and hunters, new laws requiring the safe storage of firearms and ammunition -- which essentially brought every gun in the country under lock and key, new and stringent measures for the screening of applicants for firearms licenses, new measures to ensure that courts actively sought out information about firearms in cases of spousal assault, and a wide range of prohibitions of firearms that had no legitimate place in Canada's "field and stream" tradition of firearms use.

I was one of the Department of Justice officials involved in the gun control program, and when the legislative package passed in the House of Commons, Wendy Cukier and Heidi Rathgen supplied the champagne for a victory celebration at my home in Ottawa. Their Coalition for Gun Control group had played an important role in the consultation process, as had parents of victims, like the wonderful Suzanne LaPlante-Edwards.

So what were the Liberals to do, faced with a legislative accomplishment on this scale? Simple: pretend it didn't happen, and promise to do something so dramatic that it would make Campbell look soft on gun control. Given this prescription, the obvious policy choice was a universal firearms registry.

The idea of requiring the registration of every firearm in the country was not, of course, anything new. Governments love to have lists of things. Getting lists and maintaining them is a visible sign that the government is at work; and lists are always the indispensable first step to collecting taxes and license fees. There is no "right to bear arms" constitutional issue in Canada, as is at least arguably the case -- though it is a bad argument in the hands of the NRA -- in the United States.

So why not go for a universal gun registry? The short answer, arrived at by every study of the option in the Department of Justice, was that it would be ruinously expensive, and could actually yield a NEGATIVE public security result ....more on this in a moment. Indeed, Canada already had extensive experience with firearms registries. We had two functioning systems of gun registration in 1992 -- the complete registry of all restricted firearms, such as handguns -- the ownership and use of which had been restricted since the 1930's, and a separate registry of ordinary firearms.

This latter registry, which started in the early 1970's, was a feature of the "firearms acquisition certificate" (or FAC) required by a person purchasing any firearm. Every firearm purchased from a dealer had to be registered to the FAC holder by the vendor, and the record of the purchase passed on to the R.C.M.P. in Ottawa. This meant that we were building up a cumulative registry of all of the guns in the country -- and their owners -- purchased since 1970.

The FAC system did not aspire to universality. It was a very Canadian -- i.e. sensible -- approach to the registration of ordinary hunting and target firearms. If you were a good 'ol boy from Camrose, Alberta, and didn't want to get involved, you didn't have to....as long as you didn't buy any more guns. Good old boys eventually die, of course, and younger people still active in the shooting sports would eventually all be enrolled in the system.

The value of the FAC registry was apparent to me when, in the wake of the Montreal Massacre, the Deputy Minister of Justice, Mr. John Tait, gave me the task of reviewing the gun control package under development. One of the things I immediately wanted to know was how many Ruger "Mini-14's" -- the gun used by the Montreal murderer -- were owned by Canadians. The Mini-14 came into production about the time of the introduction of the FAC requirement, so the FAC system could provide a fairly accurate picture of the gun's distribution in Canada.

But when I asked the firearms team to get the information from the R.C.M.P., it turned out that there were dozens of reasons we couldn't have it. The computers were down; the FAC information hadn't been entered yet; there weren't enough staff to process the request; there was a full moon; and on and on.

After a week of this I made it clear that I didn't want excuses, I wanted the records. At which time a very senior person sat me down and told me the truth. The R.C.M.P. had, for some time, stopped accepting FAC records, and had actually destroyed some that it already had in its possession. The FAC registry "system" did not exist because the police regarded it as useless, had refused to waste any of their limited budget on its maintenance, and had taken steps to ensure that their political masters could not order its resurrection.

This spectacular bit of bureaucratic vandalism on the part of the police persuaded my Deputy and his Minister that we should concentrate on developing compliance with affordable gun control measures that could work. A universal gun registry could only appeal to people who didn't care about costs or results, and who didn't understand what riled up the decent folks in Camrose.

Which is precisely why it appealed to the spin doctors putting together the Liberal Red Book for the pivotal 1993 election. If the object of the policy exercise was to appear to be "tougher" on guns than Campbell, it was crucial to advance a policy that would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would be more effective in convincing the urban Liberal constituency that Chretien and Rock were taking a tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting politically disastrous fury on Parliament Hill.

Here is the supreme irony of the gun registry battle. The policy was selected BECAUSE it would goad people who knew something about guns and policy to public outrage. That is, it had a purely political purpose in the special context of a hard-fought election, and the fact that it was bad policy was actually crucial to the specific political effect it was supposed to deliver.

After one of the early firearm owners demonstrations in Ottawa, a member of the media commented to me that all she saw on Parliament Hill that day were "a lot of middle-aged men wearing tractor caps." True enough. But it would be as accurate, and much more important, to have seen a bunch of working family men whose first reflex was to respect and obey the laws of our country.

The political alienation and disaffection of this group is a far, far greater loss than the several hundreds of millions of dollars that have been wasted. The rolling over of the clock at the New Year introduced tens of thousands -- perhaps hundreds of thousands -- of decent Canadians to the dubious thrills of criminality.

The creation of this new criminal class -- the ultimate triumph of negative political alchemy -- will come to be understood as the worst, and most enduring, product of the gun registry culture war.

See also

• Gun politics in Canada
• Canadian gun registry
• Bill C-391