To: ca-firearms From: Greg Broiles Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:51:01 -0700 Subject: [ca-firearms] Postmortem for Canada's $1B gun registration project List members may find this article to be of interest: "Canada Firearms: Armed Robbery", _Baseline_, July 2004, p. 55. Also at . This is not an (apparently) political article - Baseline is an IT industry magazine, and the article discusses Canada's gun registration database as an IT project. A number of interesting facts were revealed in the article, including: The cost to track each gun was initially estimated at $4.60; the cost is now above $140 per gun. The system was altered during implementation, so that it not only tracks firearms or convictions, but allegations of threats or violence, such that people who have merely been accused of a crime may be denied the right to own a gun. Only 10% of the license applications were processed without further contact between the registry and the citizen, either via call center or contact from local law enforcement. The initial estimate was that 90% of applications would be processed without further contact. The initial financial projections showed a net cost to Canada of $2M: $119M in costs, offset by $117M in license fee revenue. Instead, the costs have risen to $1B, license fee revenue by the end of 2002 was $4.3M because license fees have been lowered or dropped in an effort to encourage registration. Canada estimated that there were 7.9 million firearms in Canada; 7 million of them have been registered so far, by 2 million registrants (out of 2.45M firearm owners), with 12,000 licenses denied or revoked. You can find the report from the Auditor General of Canada describing the gun/owner registration database project at (or ). Further, as discussed in (or ), the RCMP and the Auditor General expressed serious reservations about the quality of the police databases used to screen applicants, indicating that there were a number of examples where people were included who should not be, and people were not included who should be. -- Greg Broiles