Real Quick:

The tidal wave of hits from getting Instalaunched seems to have passed. For those of you who decided to hang around like driftwood washed ashore, welcome! I promise to build a bonfire I'll try to post something worth reading this evening.

In the meantime, read up on Canada's complete disaster otherwise known as their attempt to register all (legal, honest) gun owners and their firearms.

It seems that they had recent computer crashes that wiped out quite an unknown number of names in the registry. But that's just the latest in a long series of problems.

Here's what has happened since May 7:

- The Justice Department revealed it had awarded $400,000 to a gun control coalition last year and the money was used to hire lobbyists to press the government to maintain the program;

I cannot help but wonder if The Brady Center or The Violence Policy Center receives federal dollars. I know that the Centers for Disease Control are using tax dollars to promote gun control as a "health care" topic.

- The former head of the centre said no one was fired at the centre despite Prime Minister Jean Chretien's claim that people were dismissed or demoted as the costs of the registry soared;

You mean he lied? But, but, he's a government official!

- It turns out the government had spent at least $17 million more on the firearms registry than the outrageous $1 billion cost cited by Auditor General Sheila Fraser last fall; and

- Ontario announced it will join Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Alberta and Manitoba in refusing to prosecute people who have not registered their guns, leaving the job up to already over-burdened federal prosecutors.

The registry, which was sold to Parliament and the general public on the promise that it would only cost taxpayers $2 million, and then be self-supported from fees. Now, according to this piece, the bill has exceeded the $1 billion that the Auditor General projected. I have to give her the benefit of the doubt - she did say that the accounting was so screwed up and that the information was so hard to drag out of anybody that at best the $1BN was a guess, but she figured it would take until 2005 to hit that mark. It's only 2003. And estimates are that at least a quarter of Canadian gun owners have not registered. There's some question as to just how many gun owners there are in Canada, but the government estmates that 500,000 owners have not complied. They have until the end of this month.

On the good side, five of Canada's provinces have refused to prosecute violators, leaving it up to the federal government to enforce.

But gun control proponents here think, for some reason, that American gun owners would go along with the idea.

Not bleeding likely.