In 1976, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police published a position paper on gun control and among the things it stated were that it called firearms registration “administratively unrealistic and unworkable” and went on to say that “the licensing, serialization, and registration of firearms will not act as a deterrence to violence and will not necessarily identify the person perpetrating the crime” as well as “cessation of firearms sales will not remove them from those who can do violence”.
Seems like police organizations today would echo those comments and observations as stated in that paper.
But Canada went ahead full steam with registration only to cancel it decades later. Complete fiasco.