This isn’t really news, but I just ran across a seemingly pretty impartial article on this in an impartial magazine (Baseline, which appears to be a business magazine) about this. The subhead (available in the PDF version, which requires registration):
A national computerized firearm registry in Canada was supposed to cost taxpayers $2 million. Instead, it has held them up for more than $1 billion.
The article explains some of the things that went wrong; it doesn’t take a stand on whether the registry has helped reduce crime. It does note that gun deaths and gun murders have fallen since 1989, but for many reasons that says little about the effectiveness of the firearms registry (one reason of the many is that the registry only got going in the late 1990s). But it should be a warning that, regardless of whether we think that this sort of project might in principle be valuable, there are huge potential costs with it — and the costs in the U.S., which has probably 25 times the guns that Canada has, would likely be even greater.
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