In today’s National Post, Canadian columnist Lorne Gunter reports an interview with John Hicks, the former Webmaster for the Canadian Firearms Centre (CFC). The CFC is the national gun control center, which is supposed to maintain the registry of all rifles and shotguns which was created by the former Liberal government in 1995 legislation. According to Gunter, Hicks “contends that anyone with a home computer, an Internet connection and a little patience can hack into the national firearms database and find out who owns guns, where they live and what makes and models they possess.” The CFC computers are known to have been breached 306 times between 1995 and 2003. The computer registry has cost over half a billion Canadian dollars so far, and still doesn’t work. Gunter reports that last December, the contractor “flew in folks from around Canada with the intention they would stay in Ottawa and do testing for six weeks.” But “After one day, all were sent home because the application crashed over 90 times with over 30 Severity-1 crashes.” The new Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to abolish the dysfunctional long gun registry, and spend the savings on the police; however, Harper leads a minority government so it is not clear if he will be able to accomplish his objective. A research paper by professor Gary Mauser for the Fraser Institute provides the full story on the long gun registry debacle.

Filed under: Canada, guns