The decision to kill the long-gun part of the firearms registry is about both politics and core beliefs on how to fight crime and whether the registry helped do that.

For one opponent on the losing side, it's all about politics.

"It is not about safety. It is not even about money. It is just payback to the gun lobby," Wendy Cukier of the Coalition for Gun Control told The Canadian Press on May 16.

The money spent to set up the registry -- a project that went wildly over-budget, costing almost $1 billion by 2005 -- has been spent.

Auditor General Sheila Fraser has said many of the Canada Firearms Centre's management problems have been fixed since her last look at the gun registry program in 2002.

Ongoing operating costs for operating the long gun portion of the registry have been set at $10 million per year by the Coalition for Gun Control (the centre's budget was $82.3 million).

The May 17 announcement cuts that budget by $10 million. Roy Rempel, a policy adviser in the public safety ministry, told CTV.ca that $10 million didn't represent the cost of registering long guns and instead were savings identified by registry management.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said he'll exclude long-barreled weapons such as hunting rifles and shotguns from the revamped registry, only requiring handguns and restricted weapons to be registered.

He also declared an amnesty for those whose licences have lapsed that is backdated to Jan. 1, 2004.

"The amnesty ... enables them to get a licence, comply with the law and come back into the system," Rempel said, although the intent clearly is to eventually end registration of long-barreled weapons.

The waiving of fees will cost $20 million per year, he said.

Cukier told CTV.ca that showed this was never about money.

In making the announcement, Day also argued the registry is ineffective as a crime-fighting tool.

Some in the anti-gun-registry community support that view.

"The firearms control system unfortunately only affects people who voluntarily comply with the law. It has no effect on any violent criminal using his firearm for criminal purposes," Doug Tomlinson of the National Firearms Association told CTV Newsnet on May 15.

In the 2004 federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper talked of "a useless gun registry that makes criminals out of law-abiding citizens."

While the Tories maintained in the 2006 campaign that they would repeal the registry and use the savings to hire police and help victims, Harper tended to talk up tougher sentences for criminals who use guns in crimes.

Now that the partial repeal is in motion, the move will likely prove popular in most of rural Canada -- an area that heavily supported the Conservatives in the 2006 federal election.

Actually, Paul Steckle, who represents the southwest Ontario riding of Huron-Bruce for the Liberals, had his family pose with rifles and camouflage for his 2004 Christmas card to constituents. The avowed gun-registry-hater was one of the few rural Grits to survive after the Jan. 23 vote.

The gun-owning community hated the gun registry right from the time it became law in 1995 and have never let up in their fight to kill it.

Part of the backlash was cultural. Many ranchers out West routinely carry rifles in their trucks in case they come across a steer in a remote pasture with a broken leg, for example. Aboriginal people in the north often have rifles nearby for subsistence hunting.

In many rural areas across the country, hunting is very much an ongoing part of life.

With the registry's inclusion of long guns and shotguns, they saw themselves as being under attack.

In urban Canada, however, spectacular gun crimes in the mid-1990s made people feel like they were under attack, and that's where the Liberal Party's base lives.

That triggered the creation of Bill C-68, which in turn started the long war.

"It's a downtown Toronto solution that doesn't work for 99 per cent of Canada," Jim Hinter, then-president of the National Firearms Association, told Maclean's magazine in 2002 about the gun registry.

Does it work?

Despite cost overruns, the key question is whether the gun registry helps make Canadians safer, both by reducing gun deaths and crime?

A 2005 Statistics Canada study found that between 1979 and 2002, gun deaths in Canada fell from about six per 100,000 in 1979 to 2.6 per 100,000 in 2002. Progressively tighter gun control laws were passed in 1977, 1991 and 1995.

In a sidebar on gun control laws, the study noted the gun death rate continued to drop, but added: "Of course, it is difficult to measure the contribution that gun control regulations may have made to this decrease."

The Statistics Canada study noted, however, that the proportion of homicides attributed to guns remained constant, at about one in three.

Rempel said the key part is the licencing. "That's where you have the screening, the background checks, the safety training. Attempting to count every gun in the country, which is what the registry does, doesn't add a lot to public safety."

While the registry may have helped by making people who weren't serious about firearms ownership give up their guns, some critics say it doesn't do anything to control the influx of illegal guns from the United States.

Rempel said in 2003, there were 161 firearms homicides in Canada. Of those, two were committed with legal, long-barreled weapons. "The majority of the rest were illegal handguns," he said.

Cukier said the purpose of a licence and registry system is to keep legal guns from entering the illegal market.

"If there is no record kept of who is in legal possession of the legal guns, there's very little to prevent those legal guns from being sold illegally."

In its 2000 ruling on a constitutional challenge to the registry, the Supreme Court of Canada said one could not separate registration from licencing, she said.

Cukier said while handguns are the preferred weapons of urban gangsters, "that certainly doesn't mean a rifle or a shotgun can't be just as deadly if it's not properly controlled."

Is the registry really over?

At some point, the legislation governing the registry has to be changed.

The Tories have at least tacitly admitted they don't have the votes to get it changed.

And critics said the amnesty move was an attempt to satisfy a Tory election promise while dodging Parliament.

Day described the amnesty as an opportunity to comply with the gun law "as it is -- or the law as it will be at May 17 a year from now.''

If the legislation hasn't been changed by May 17, 2007, Rempel said dealing with that scenario would be a government decision.

Rosemary Thompson, CTV's deputy Ottawa bureau chief, told CTV.ca that in a year, "they can extend the amnesty."

And if the Tories lose the next election and the replacement government wants to re-establish the registry, rebuilding the database "would cost a bloody fortune," she said.

While some Western provincial governments have hailed the move to curtail the registry, Ontario and Quebec said they would fight it.

"Ontario and Quebec, two provinces that face very similar challenges when it comes to gun crime and organized crime, are united in our resolve to keep this important crime-fighting tool in place,'' said Michael Bryant, Ontario's attorney-general, on July 17.

"It not only makes police safer, but assists police in making Canadians safer.''

An Ipsos-Reid poll released May 15 found 71 per cent of Ontarians and 76 per cent of Quebecers support the gun registry.

Nationally, support was put at 67 per cent, but even in the Conservative bedrock province of Alberta, there was 51 per cent support (the margin of error for the overall poll of 1,000 was 3.1 per cent, but will be higher for individual provinces).

Both those Ontario and Quebec are ones where the Conservatives must make gains if they wish to form a majority government. Toronto and Montreal, for example, shut the Tories out in the January federal vote.

Stephen Harper has been working hard to woo Quebec in particular. Time will only tell if this effort to please the gun-registry-hating portion of his party's supporters will make it harder to make attract new ones whenever the next federal election happens.