What’s most interesting about the brewing disagreement between Canadian gun owners and their local police forces over a so-called “backdoor registry” is how none of the old arguments apply.

The “backdoor registry” are ledgers that Chief Firearms Officers, the RCMP officials tasked with enforcing the firearm licensing and registration regimes in their provinces, mandate that gun stores keep. Every time a firearm is purchased from a store, the purchaser’s personal information is recorded. The position taken by the Chief Firearms Officers of Ontario, and British Columbia and the Yukon, is that the scrapping of the long-gun registry has no effect on this requirement and that it remains in legal force. A business that sells a firearm must still record its make, model, serial number and the name and firearms licence number of the purchaser, or else have their business licence to sell firearms revoked, made possibly by the broad authorities granted the Firearms Officers under the Firearms Act. These rules do not apply to firearm sales between properly licenced private citizens.

Gun owners and their supporters decry this as an improvised gun registry, as their information is still being recorded. But this is a stretch. The recording of their personal information is an irritant, to be sure, but is a long way from the instantly accessible centralized federal electronic databank of their personal information, which tracked each and every gun legally owned regardless of where it was purchased.