More guns.....and gun control

Another previous post to Can.politics on firearm control....it's a response to another post by SDGreen...comments bracketed by **----- are Green's....
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SDGreen"   wrote in message news:0Gkcg.182346$WI1.82779@pd7tw2no...

 The fundamental question posed by the anti-registry advocates  How many crimes does the gun registry solve and prevent?  It's a good question, perfectly legitimate. Well, how many crimes do motor vehicle registries solve and prevent?  We don't know, exactly.  It's impossible to quantify in absolute numbers but we do know that vehicle registration does solve many crimes!
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The comparison between the gun registry and vehicle registration as they relate to solving crime, while novel, is flawed Whereas vehicles are readily identifiable by visible license plates, make, model, colour, among other attributes,  guns, and particularly handguns, are not. Last time I checked no one reported a gun license number after a drive by.

The bottom line is that neither registry  'prevents' crime. Even keeping a gun license out of the hands of someone with past history of gun violence or a 'propensity' to commit violence is meaningless since other avenues exist to obtain a firearm or other weapon (the previous firearm regime took similar precautions). A woman is just as dead when beaten with a baseball bat or stab by a knife or beaten to death as shot by a firearm.

An example, drunk driving. The penalties and public tolerance for drunk driving have escalated over the past decade. The laws governing when and where you can drink alcohol have similarly been tightened yet there are
still more than 4,000 Canadians sentenced to jail time for impaired driving. More than a 1000 Canadians die each year and many more injured by and billions are lost in property damage. (For comparison purposes, 205 people were beaten to death and 172 murdered by homicide in 2004).

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This is the fallacy pushed by antis; since the effectiveness of the gun registry cannot be measured in hard statistics then it is not effective. The proponents then counter that firearm deaths have dropped by 300 since the legislation was enacted.  The antis then counter 'how do you know it's  the registry and not some other factor?
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There has been a long-term decline in firearm related deaths since the 1970s and the trend cannot be explained by the registery alone. (In fact, StatsCan reports that homicides by firearm rose from 2003 to 2007 during the period the registry was established - another spurious correlation). According to StatsCan the number of firearm deaths has declined 50% since 1979. Of the total number of deaths by firearm, 4/5ths are suicides (which demonstrates that firearms are more of a threat to the occupants of the house where the reside than the general public. Woman, for example, are several magnitudes of order more likely to die by firearm (self-inflicted or by spouse) when a firearm is kept in the home.)

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How many people are deterred from committing offences (sic) with vehicles because of the non-anonymity factor?
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Very few. See impaired driving example above.

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It is an immeasurable intangible, but just the fact of KNOWING one is not anonymous will prevent some crimes.  This is where conservative ideology fails in determining the value of systems like the gun registry; they don't factor in the effects on human psychology. Every police officer, every detective, and every criminologist on the planet understands that anonymity is the criminal's favourite weapon!
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How many homicides are committed by firearms that are registered with the National Firearms Centre? Very few but they do occur despite the best intentions of governments and Canadians. The best argument for keeping the firearm registry has nothing to do with preventing or solving crime. The best argument is that it aids the police in knowing whether a firearm is registered to an individual when police must interact with the public. But even here the registry is seriously flawed as it constantly lags behind changes in ownership and the status of owners. In 2006, the Auditor General found serious problems with time lags between registration submissions and when they are entered into the system. So if the information is not up to date when a police officer rolls up in front of a house, what good is it?

But is this enough? The registry did not thing to prevent the murders of Brock Myrol, Lionide Johnston, PeterSchiemann or Anthony Gordon.

How could it?