CANADA’S GUN REGISTRY: Not only an expensive failure, but social and political poison:

We now know that the government’s gun-control policy is a fiscal and administrative debacle. Its costs rival those of core services like national defence. And it doesn’t work. What is less well known is that the policy wasn’t designed to control guns. . . .

Which is precisely why it appealed to those putting together the Liberal Red Book for the pivotal 1993 election. If the object of the policy exercise was to appear to be “tougher” on guns than Kim Campbell, they had to find a policy that would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would better convince the Liberals’ urban constituency that Jean Chrétien and Allan Rock were taking a tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting fury on Parliament Hill.

The supreme irony of the gun registry battle is that the policy was selected because it would goad people who knew something about guns to public outrage. That is, it had a purely political purpose in the special context of a hard-fought election. The fact that it was bad policy was crucial to the specific political effect it was supposed to deliver.

And so we saw demonstrations by middle-aged firearm owners, family men whose first reflex was to respect the laws of the land. This group’s political alienation is a far greater loss than the $200-million that have been wasted so far. The creation of this new criminal class — the ultimate triumph of negative political alchemy — may be the worst, and most enduring product of the gun registry culture war.

Personally, I think that anything that inspires large numbers of Canadians to engage in civil disobedience can’t be all bad. But Canada’s gun registry was an example of the kind of cynicism that inspires most gun-control efforts in America, too. And the results here would be far, far worse.

UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Gewirtz emails:

One reason why Bill Clinton was such a bad president is that, to a much greater degree than other recent presidents, he treated political opponents and their constituents as class enemies. His cynical alienation of gun owners and small-business people will take years to undo, even if the federal govt shows unprecedented goodwill, which it hasn’t. The Canadian left has done the same thing, but worse. These kinds of political tactics don’t work in the long run, as is now becoming obvious. Bush Jr., for all his flaws and triangulations, appears to understand this, which accounts for much of his political success in Texas and as president.

I think that’s right.