Canadian Firearms USING TECHNOLOGY TO MANAGE CANADIAN FIREARMS

The development of Canadian Firearms Program came because of the increased cases of gun violence and gun-related crimes that had rocked the country for decades. The firearms legislation bill was passed in 1995, and it immediately facilitated the establishment of Canadian Firearms Program (CFP) during the same year. The program itself was multi-jurisdictional, and it required that all firearms owners should be mandatorily registered under the Firearms Act. Therefore, an efficient information system was required to oversee the successful implementation of Canadian Firearms Program and particularly registry of firearms.

However, the Canadian Firearms Registration System had information technology bottlenecks. The complexity of its development was because a national database system was rightly in place and functioning well. The national database system required close cooperation between the Canadian National Police Force and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). This marked the first complexity of the information technology that was used in the Canadian Firearms Registration system because it required dual monitoring from the two policing authorities (Wan, 2006).

An upgrade to the system required that all other information systems and database of the police be integrated together with...

The information technology that would link the various systems and police database did not work well within the first three years of use. The entire technology had been developed since 1995 and by 2001, it was not effective, yet it had incurred huge financial resources. Some actors and partners in the development of the technology had made the CFRS more complex.
Consequently, the technology also required to be interconnected with high-speed internet services to reduce processing wait times in registration. It also required that, the information technology used in the CFRS development be linked electronically with the provincial court databases to enhance the entry of prohibition orders to the CFRS. The integration of CFRS with the police database of FIP and CPIC was complicated by the fact that, agencies did not have consistent and uniform entry procedures of gun owners to the system. The whole technology involved in CFRS development was made worse by the opposition of the system by key stakeholders such as Canada's Recreational Firearms Community (Wan, 2006).

The CFRS information technology infrastructure required that when the gun owners registered their firearms, the details of registration would easily be shared between Canada's National Police Force and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The previous systems registry…