Here’s to Jack Layton for talking sense to his caucus and apparently persuading rural New Democratic Members of Parliament to do the right thing and vote to save the national rifle and shotgun registry.
If the outcome of the Parliamentary vote later this month is indeed as Layton predicted yesterday, his New Democrats will have done a great service to law-abiding families throughout Canada.
Sticking with principles that are broadly if not unanimously supported by followers of the New Democratic Party will pay dividends for the NDP, at the very least staving off a disaster in the next Canadian general election. Many fewer NDP supporters will now feel they must vote strategically for Liberals because of the important principle embodied in the weapons registry issue.
It is typical of Layton’s generally consistent good luck — not such a bad thing to have in a leader, in politics as in war — that he appears to have achieved this goal without needing to whip his party to act responsibly. This is all the more reason for Canadians to support the NDP in the next election.
Of course, Layton will now have to endure the ugly rage typical of so many opponents of the registry, but most of us will merely shrug off their hysteria and return to the business of living our lives a little bit more safely thanks to the presence of the rifle and shotgun registry. Anyway, we will rightly conclude, people who so loathe the registry would be unlikely to vote NDP anyway.
However, as citizens of a country riven by the frequently successful wedge politics of Stephen Harper’s so-called Conservative Party, we owe it to ourselves to think seriously about why the fury of so many gun owners is so deep, when in effect all they are being asked to do is to register a dangerous possession and pay a modest user fee of the sort normally beloved by the right-wing political parties they tend to support.
The initial position most often taken by opponents of the registry is that it is “inconvenient” to ask “law-abiding gun owners” to register their firearms. The familiar response by the bewildered majority is, “Well, live with it! How is this different from registering your automobile?” (At least, so far, no one has put forward a serious policy proposal suggesting weapons owners should have to purchase insurance or pass a meaningful shooting test before owning a gun.)
Yet very often this pushes thwarted gun fanciers into a state of near-apoplexy.
So what gives when an apparently reasonable request, commonplace with a plethora of other activities in modern society, consistently prompts such a furious and irrational response on one issue? It is simply strains credulity that the problem is really the inconvenience of a minor bureaucratic procedure. Nor does it seem likely it is prompted merely by an atavistic love of things that can kill.
Gun owners who feel this way owe it to themselves and to the rest of us to think about why they feel this compulsion to rebel against a reasonable requirement that does not interfere with their ability to pursue their passion.
The CBC reported yesterday that the powerful U.S. weapons lobby, the National Rifle Association, has played an important and active role in the effort to abolish our Canadian gun registry — and it seems likely that the malign influence of this group is related to the hysteria exploited by Harper on this side of the border.
Increasingly, the NRA is an integral part of the growing paranoid subculture in the United States that poses a genuine threat to law and order south of the 49th Parallel.
No surprise then, that such people would try to propagandize susceptible Canadians with a worldview in which citizens require firearms to defend themselves against too-liberal governments.
If nothing else, Canadian opponents of the weapons registry need to acknowledge that significant numbers of their fellow registry opponents want guns as a hedge against liberal policies by governments, and fear the registry because they don’t want the police to know they have weapons for fear they will come in black helicopters to take them away.
Those of us who support “liberal” policies need to think seriously about the implications of this too.
As for registry opponents, admitting that one can’t control one’s compulsion is the first step to recovery.
The second step for those enraged by the Canadian gun registry may be recognizing that there’s nothing in our Constitution giving anyone a right to bear arms, or for that matter to pursue happiness in anti-social ways. There is no Second Amendment to the Canadian Constitution, nor will there ever be, thank goodness.
We do enjoy a constitutional promise, however, of “peace, order and good government.”
Our chances of experiencing peace and order were considerably enhanced by Layton’s success this week within the NDP caucus. As for good government, though, that will be up to the rest of us in the next general election.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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