Fourteen of the sixteen most recent police officers to be killed with guns in Canada were shot with long guns.
Overwhelmingly, police chiefs across the country regard the gun registry as a vital tool that protects their officers especially when they are dealing with domestic disputes. Frank Eisner, chief of police for Greater Sudbury, right in the heart of long gun country in northern Ontario, who strongly supports the registry, has made the point that Sudbury police use the registry, in particular, when called out on cases of domestic disputes and violence in the home.
As Mavis Moore, a 72-year-old Saskatchewan woman who has been an avid hunter over the years, told the Toronto Star, the gun registry question is "not a matter of rural versus urban. It's a public safety issue. How many women and children in rural Canada are threatened in their own homes with a gun? More than we want to know, I think."
Moore, who enjoys guns, supports the registry, not least because she can still remain the time she looked up the barrel of a .22 a man was pointing at her and her mother when she was four years old.
A recent Harris/Decima poll found that 47 per cent of rural women want to keep the registry while 40 per cent would abolish it.
Conservative House leader John Baird ignores the concerns of police officers and rural women.
He represents a riding in the west end of Ottawa where not much more moose hunting goes on than in downtown Toronto. But it's the dastardly "Toronto elites," Baird says, who are out to thwart the will of rural Canadians on the issue of the registry. According to Ontario Liberal cabinet minister Glen Murray, when Baird is not out fulminating against "Toronto elites," he's hanging out with them enjoying cosmos -- a cocktail made with vodka, Triple Sec, cranberry juice and fresh-squeezed lime juice or sweetened lime juice -- in the glamorous Byzantium Toronto bar and restaurant. That's where Rusty (Baird's nickname) can just get on with being an unabashed member of the elite he claims to disdain.
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Baird and Stephen Harper are well aware that polls consistently show that a plurality of Canadians favour keeping the registry. The Harris/Decima poll found 48 per cent of those polled favouring retention, with 38 per cent supporting abolition. But they refuse to compromise on the issue. Changes could be made to the rules of the registry to ensure that it will always be free, easy to access, and with no threat of criminal charges for non-compliance for the first two violations.
The last thing the Conservative high command wants is a solution on the issue that would suit almost everybody. They only care about it as a wedge. They want to wave the bloody shirt of the nefarious registry during the next election.
Baird's calculation is that even though most of his constituents undoubtedly favour retention of the registry, he won't pay a political price for his abolitionist stance. He figures that those who are passionate about killing the registry are much more likely to make this the issue that will determine how they vote than is the case for the larger number who would keep the registry.
Good for Baird. He can go on being a poseur on behalf of gun owners, while enjoying cosmos in the heart of wicked Toronto, and seeking the support of Ottawa voters.
For anyone who isn't aware of this, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police is sponsored by Gun Registry IT contractor CGI, making CACP defacto paid corporate lobbyists.
For all the Liberal conspiracy-mongerong about the NRA, everyone's ignoring a big elephant in the room. The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), headquartered in Britain and funded by billionaires in the U.S. (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) has been one of the Liberals' and NDPers' advisors/lobbyists on gun control, as well as using its deep pockets to bankroll groups like the Coalition for Gun Control.
Coalition for Gun Control maven Wendy Cukier received an illegal government lobbyist grant from the Liberal government, of $380,000, to act as a mouthpiece for the Chretien regime's firearms legislation. Cukier also owns Telecon Consulting, an IT firm which benefits from Firearms Centre (registry) related contracts from the RCMP.
The long-gun registry, like the old handgun registry, has never solved, nor prevented a crime. Frontline officers, along with Rick Hanson (Calgary Police Chief) and Julian Fantino (OPP) have frankly stated that the registry is useless. Supporters realize this, which is why they keep flogging the '11,000 hits per day' statistic. This is a number generated by automatic police computer searches, on everything from fender-benders to jaywalking tickets. And a whistleblower has admitted that the RCMP/Firearms Centre actually PAYS police forces to use the registry, in order to inflate useage numbers. If this is true, this is departmental fraud on a massively criminal scale.
The Firearms Act actually suspends Charter rights for legal firearms owners, who must submit to warrantless search and siezure. Contrast this with convicted criminals, carrying illegal and unlicensed/unregistered weapons, who have their Charter rights against police searches intact. This is nothing whatsoever like licensing and registering a car: you can let your driver's license lapse and park your car in the garage, but letting your firearms license lapse, or not registering your gun[s] can land you a five-year jail term. And non-compliance with registration is massive, with an estimated 30-50% of the LEGALLY-ACQUIRED (under the old FAC system) long guns unregistered. That, in itself, is an admission of failiure.
The gun registry is a confiscation registry. In Toronto, the Police force of Bill Blair (the G20 protesters' favorite) went on a spree of warrantless 'inspections' of elderly PAL/POL holders, looking for 'unsafe storage' and other infractions. People who had let their POLs and PALs lapse had their registered firearms siezed by Blair's stormtroopers, including people without so much as a parking ticket on their records. And the RCMP has been systematically and arbitrarilly reclassifying firearms, into the 'prohibited' category. The Firearms Act's architect, Allan Rock, bluntly stated that civilians shouldn't own guns. This comes at a time when the Toronto Police Service is utterly unwilling to deal with the city's horrendous gang problem, like the parolled thugs who murdered Jane Creba, and the RCMP has bungled one case after another. The parallels between police firearms enforcement and the G20 protesters (letting Black Bloc anarchists torch police cruisers, but roughing up and detaining peaceful protesters) should be obvious.
The RCMP report, pegging the cost of the LGR at $4M annually, is an obvious fiction. PSAC is fighting to save 240 jobs on the non-restricted firearms licensing file alone (not the restricted/prohibited registry, or licensing employees)--in terms of labour costs, and excluding things like IT support, the annual expendature would be MUCH higher than the quoted number. There is clearly some very creative accounting going on, here, which the Auditor General should have a look at.
During the Chretien-Martin years, the Liberals refused to arm border guards and disbanded the Ports Police (both of which are important in the interdiction of arms smuggling), and tried to close two RCMP crime labs--for cost reasons. They cut funding for breast cancer research--for cost reasons. Yet the Liberals have defended their $2B sinkhole, the Firearms Act, as a 'public safety' and 'women's health' expense. And all of this talk about a 'compromise' on the registry is rubbish. Bill C-391 IS a compromise, which leaves the rest of the Liberal's odious Firearms Act intact. And there is no way to 'decriminalize' the registry, as Ignatieff and Layton have proposed, without taking firearms law out of the Criminal Code (i.e., scrapping the firearms act entirely). The Liberals know this, and are lying through their teeth.
I don't know why Mr Laxer is defending the Liberal position on gun control. Maybe, by sucking up to that party, he's hoping for a plum appointment to some crown corporation, like his dad got from Pierre Trudeau on Petro Canada's board of directors. Or, as a self-described 'red diaper baby,' Laxer loves statism and an antrusive government, like the Marxist-Leninist countries which registered all firearms before confiscating them and imposing the authoritarian nightmare of the Communist police state. And I detect a note of homophobia over John Baird (coctail-sipping and whatnot), which makes me wonder if Laxer longs for Soviet-style criminalization of homosexuality, along with civilian firearms ownership.
Is a parked car as dangerous as a gun? It would make sense for a police officer to want to know about weapons when approaching a home; the gun can be hidden as opposed to a parked car. Absolutely we should be concerned about statism but we should be concerned about when its horns are at their greatest length and at their greatest sharpness. Most particulary when it is courts going after environmental activists or the state doing everything to protect an oil company.
And rifles are no matches for government tanks or troops anyway, by the way.
"And rifles are no matches for government tanks or troops anyway, by the way."
Tell that to all of the People's Liberation groups (LTTE, Zapatistas) people here like to support. The state should not have a monopoly on power, in a free society.
You can't defend one freedom, and dismiss another. Do you think it's okay for the Charter to be negated (warrantless search and siezure of property), when it comes to having a gun in your home? Okay, then--maybe the police can start random searches of people's homes for missing children (like Bill Blair wanted to do, when Miriam Makhniashvili went missing), or Muslims' and Sikhs' homes for explosive materials (like I suspect some in the RCMP would like to do), and the former Vancouver city council pushed for warrantless searches for grow-ops by firefighters and utility workers. If you think rights shouldn't apply to one class of people, or type of posession, you are setting yourself up for the loss of ALL rights. Statism creep never stops.
Darling Wendy would have us believe the sky is falling, perhaps she should actually review her statistics before running to the media with her latest revelations. Dr Gary Mauser from Simon Frasier University started out trying to prove that firearms control and laws actually work, but guess what, he was unable to find any evidence to prove his theory instead he found the exact opposite. Google Dr Gary Mauser and read some of his well documented findings. Not all Police Chiefs support the registry as the media would have us believe. In fact while Wendy's claim about 14 Police officers being killed by firearms could well be countered by the number of innocent citizens that have been murdered by law enforcement errors over the same period. " and rifles are no matches for government tanks or troops anyway" doesn't fly either! Afgan' s and Taliban seen to be doing just fine.
2dawall follow up to your comment, potentialy yes a parked car can be just as dangerous. Some low life steals your parked car andruns from police gets into an accident and kills a family. Police that rely on the registry for accurate information are inept and stupid as are their leaders who feel this money pit is worth saving. Listen to what the head of the OPP has to say and the Calgary and Winnipeg police chief's, As I said before take the time to research Dr Gary Mauser.
Whoa! CYS, we are not yet in Mexico and any slide toward that involves any number of issues including the economy and the destruction of the environment. I am not dismissing any freedom but it is just the registration of firearms, the same level of paperwork that we already have to do for any number of things. I just question the attitudes, assumptions of those so intent on fighting the registration of guns with such false arguments and comparisons.
Re: rufous03 so police are inept and stupid but the ones that support your view are OK?
The intent of a car is not to get stolen; the intent of a gun is to shoot a bullet that kills, period. False comparison.
If it is a money pit (entirely possible) there are any number of biggers money pits in our economy that the public treasury bleeds into (subsidies for oil. timber) and they do not get this level of intensity, negativity or weird arguments.