MONTREAL—Vito Anobile snips the gray hairs of a long-time client and shakes his head. “It’s crazy,” the affable east-end Montreal barber says, scissors and comb balancing in each of his thrown-up hands. “Really crazy.”
What has Anobile, an avid hunter, both frustrated and mystified are the recent actions of Canada’s controversial gun registry.
The $70 million firearms program, (cough* 2 billion, cough*) including the gun registry, is supposed to protect the public by preventing the misuse of guns and controlling just who can get them and own them.
But the 68-year-old Anobile has a story that seems to call all of that into question.
His frustration has been building ever since last summer when the registry sent him a notice that someone was trying to register a shotgun. Anobile’s shotgun.
The only problem? It had been stolen 11 years before.
To make matters worse, despite Anobile’s repeated attempts to tell the registry the gun was stolen property, no one seemed to listen or understand.
The agency, for which the RCMP has responsibility, even assumed he had applied to transfer the weapon to the new owner.
“How could I transfer a stolen gun I don’t have, to someone I don’t know?” Anobile asks.
And for that matter, “How can a gun be registered 11 years after it was stolen?”
As all this was happening, the Conservative government, no fan of the long-gun registry, was making its most serious attempt yet to shut it down. Among the reasons? The government said it was simply ineffective.
And as hints of an election campaign grow, the registry is sure to be a major issue. After losing a razor-thin vote on the matter last September, the Conservatives are still vowing to scrap it.
“This is just one of many examples of how inaccurate and ineffective the long-gun registry continues to be,” said Candice Hoeppner, the Manitoba Tory MP whose anti-registry bill died in that vote, in an email to the Star.
Meanwhile, the RCMP released an evaluation last fall strongly supporting the registry. It said the registry protects officers by signalling the presence of guns in a dwelling, for instance. And it aids in many types of investigations. Police now heavily consult the registry.
Doctors and police chiefs point out that long-gun homicides are decreasing in Canada. (Handgun homicides, however, are on the rise.)
The story of Anobile’s gun begins on a frigid Sunday in November 1999. He returns from a hunting trip, leaving all his hunting gear, including his shotgun, a Beretta A-M-301 12-gauge, in his car. It’s a decision he’ll come to regret.
The next day, he visits his ailing 98-year-old father in Montreal’s Santa Cabrini hospital. When he returns to the parking lot, however, his Chevy Lumina is gone.
He reports the theft to the police. Three or four days later, he remembers, the police call to say the Lumina had been recovered. It had been used, they say, in a robbery at an east-end brasserie, and abandoned.
There’s no sign of the gun.
Eventually, Anobile’s insurance company replaces the gun with a new Beretta. And he hears nothing more on the subject.
Until last June.
The old gun resurfaces in a letter from the Canadian Firearms Registry, saying it had received a registration demand for the A-M-301. There’s no mention it had been stolen.
Anobile calls the registry. “They ask me if I sold the gun. I tell them, ‘No! It was stolen!’ ” They promise to open a file and investigate.
Then, in July, another letter. The exact same letter as in June. As if the previous communication never happened.
“I laughed because it was like they’re imbeciles,” Anobile says.
Then, in August, another letter. This time more specific, saying it has processed his application to transfer the gun to the new owner, who, an employee tells Anobile, lives in Brossard, a Montreal suburb.
Only he made no such application. “How could I have?” Anobile says. “It’s impossible.”
Reached by phone, an agent from the registry told the Star he had no idea where the gun has been all these years, or how it got in the hands of the new owner.
He also said that the police have decided to “overlook” the fact that it was stolen because the new owner appeared to have acquired it “in good faith.”
(So can I re-register a stolen car?)
An RCMP spokesperson said this type of situation “is quite common.”
“People who have their firearm stolen, and are compensated for the firearm through insurance, lose legal ownership of the firearm at that moment,” Sgt. Greg Cox wrote in an email.
“If the firearm is recovered, oftentimes the insurance company may take possession of the firearm and put it up for sale on consignment with a firearms dealer.”
So why the notices to Anobile? Why the assumption he had applied to transfer the firearm? And why didn’t the registry seem to know it was stolen?
We don’t know, because the RCMP refused to discuss Anobile’s case, for privacy reasons.
When it comes to stolen weapons, the RCMP argues the registry can help police find a stolen firearm’s rightful owner if it’s recovered.
For Anobile, it’s all very unnerving. “Did it kill 50 people in the last decade that we don’t know?”
“Something’s not working right,” he reasons. “For me (the registry) has been useless. It is there to create jobs, nothing more.”
“We are obliged to follow the law, but it’s not worth very much.”
The gun registry has been plagued by controversy ever since it was made into law by the government of then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in 1995.
There was severe criticism over cost overruns in the early years. And Canada’s auditor general in 2006 questioned how the registry is actually improving public safety.
The registry is only a small part of the firearms program, making up 1.6 to 4.8 per cent of overall costs, or about $2.5 million, according to a 2009 analysis for the RCMP. Don't bet on these figures, previous documents place it at around 79 million a year.
courtsey of the Toronto Star
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