A Global News investigation has found dozens more misclassified firearms which might be deleted with the long gun registry.

Yesterday, Global News reported finding 361 handguns
and three automatic weapons classified as if they were mainstream
rifles or shotguns, which, all other things being equal, means that
their data will be deleted. Since that story appeared, we have
found more than 120 weapons in the firearms registry which aren't
classified at all. They include 33 handguns - prohibited or restricted
weapons, depending on barrel length - and 12 automatic weapons, which
may or may not have been converted to semi-automatic fire."(Under
Bill C-19) If there is a record relating to a firearm that is not
prohibited or restricted, it needs to be destroyed," Ottawa lawyer
Solomon Friedman explains. "I think what this highlights more than
anything is the level of inaccuracy in the registry in the first place:
that you can have a Glock there in the data that has no class."However,
after being provided with the erroneous data, The RCMP now says it
will investigate and correct any errors before deleting the long gun
data base."The records pointed out by Global News had been
flagged for follow up. Such records would not be destroyed if, after
verification, they turn out to actually be restricted or prohibited
firearms," said Greg Cox, a media relations officer with the force. This
is in addition to an on-going process to clean up the registry prior to
deletion. "The deletion of this data is a complex process, which
includes sorting records of restricted and prohibited firearms from
those of non-restricted firearms, so that the restricted and prohibited
records are not destroyed. In some cases, owners of restricted and
prohibited firearms have erroneously registered them as non-restricted.
The CFP has ongoing data quality control procedures to find and flag
these errors by firearm owners, and correct them."HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS

Until April, Canada’s firearm registration system tracked three types of firearms:

Non-restricted weapons
are shotguns and rifles normally used by hunters and farmers. The
database tracking these weapons, which legislation passed in April has
ordered destroyed, is referred to as the “long-gun registry”. Restricted weapons mostly covers handguns with barrels over a given length.

Prohibited weapon
is a confusing term – a better one might be ‘strictly regulated.’ This
category includes handguns with barrels under a given length and a small
number of legally owned automatic weapons. Restricted and prohibited weapons will continue to be registered. Owners of any type of firearm must still be licenced.

The
new batch of firearms include two home-made Sten guns - simply designed
British sub-machine guns produced in large numbers during the Second
World War - 15 revolvers and 18 semi-automatic handguns. There is also
an Austrian-made sub-machine gun described as 'experimental'. Automatic
weapons and converted automatic weapons are both classed as prohibited
weapons. (Legally, firearms in Canada must be categorized as
non-restricted, restricted or prohibited. Bill C-19, possed into law in
April, requires officials to delete information on firearms which are
not classified as restricted or prohibited. These ‘non-restricted’
categorized weapons are form what is typically referred to as the long
gun registry.)The new discoveries bring the total of restricted
and prohibited weapons in line to be erroneously deleted with the long
gun registry to 407. Part of the root of the problem lay in the
design of the registry, argues John Evers of the Canadian Shooting
Sports Association:"They wrote software which made it possible to
make a simple mouse-click error. The system allowed you to register a
handgun as non-restricted. Any good software engineer would have made
sure that can't happen - that once you select 'handgun' you can't select
'non-restricted,' but the system let them do it.""We were not
all that co-operative,” Evers says of some gun owners’ response to the
registry process. “I know several people who put down everything as
unknown - unknown make, unknown serial number, because the law said that
if you made an error, you were liable for those errors. So to be safe,
they said they didn't know. A lot of my guns are 'unknown make/unknown
model' as a protest against what they are trying to do."A
redacted copy of the national firearms database, including the doomed
long gun data, was released to Global News under access-to-information
laws in May."These facts should give the government of so called
'law and order' serious reasons to review those facts very carefully
before destroying all data from the long gun registry," said Opposition
justice critic Françoise Boivin. "First to protect all good law abiding
Canadian citizens who registered their guns and second in the name of
basic public security."The long gun registry outside Quebec has not yet actually been deleted, though police no longer have access to it.





http://www.globalnews.ca/interactive/120619_firearms/index.html