Since the Gun Registry came into existence in the 1990s, it's been in force, along with other measures of our country's Gun Control regime for quite some time. The CPoC talking point is, of course, well this guy's guns were all registered, and it didn't stop _him_ from committing a crime.
First, let's be practical. Canada has guns, and will have guns seeping across the border from the United States. No regime of gun control is going to be 100% effective, nor will it guarantee that someone won't use their firearms in a crime.
Second, one cannot take a 'single' case and claim that therefore the gun control regime is utterly ineffective. In order to assess whether gun control is effective, one has to examine that statistical incidence of gun related crimes.
So, I went digging. Finding long term studies that track the use of guns in crime is difficult - it's not been a vector that Statistics Canada appears to track regularly.
I found two important studies, one quite current, the other a fair bit older.
The first study tracks gun fatalities from 1979 through to 2002. Here it is in PDF (The report itself starts on p. 37). It contains the following synopsis of gun control in Canada:
I think this is pretty clear - the trend overall has been downwards. Is it at zero? No, of course not.
The second study is a comparison between Canada and US crime rates involving firearms from 1989 to 1996. Again, I will point out that Canada has a lower crime rate than the United States, it's significantly lower (Canada having less than 20% the rate of firearm homicide than its neighbor to the south).
So, can we argue that "gun control doesn't work"? No - of course not. It's quite clear that in 25 years of gun control that Canada's violent incidence rate is not only in steady decline, but it is also a fraction of the rate seen south of the 49th parallel.
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