We suspected it and now it is confirmed. The Conservatives don't think domestic violence is a crime.
MP Candace Hoeppner said as much on CBC Radio, no less, in Toronto last week. At the tail-end of her long, failed crusade against the long-gun registry, she distinguished use of the registry in domestic violence from fighting crime.
She said: "if the only defence of it [the gun registry] right now is domestic violence" then that means "nobody is saying that it [the registry] stops crime anymore." It's hard to interpret that any other way than it expressing the thought that domestic violence is not a crime.
Conservatives appear to think preventing suicides is a bit of a waste of time too. Apparently, the only lives the gun registry is worth saving are those that are caused by "criminal" activity. Or, as Hoeppner puts it: "I'm kind of watching with interest the pro argument that's being made. It doesn't even have to do with stopping crime in the sense of criminal activity. It has to do with domestic violence and suicide."
So, as this reasoning would appear to suggest: if someone wants to go ahead and kill themselves, fine -- it ain't a crime is it? And the gun registry is supposed to be there to prevent crimes, like duh. In this argument, Ms Hoeppner appears to be working with a different definition of crime on behalf of her Conservative colleagues. A definition that defies the Criminal Code of Canada that says a murder is a murder no matter who commits it. One that says when a woman is killed by her husband it's not a crime, but if she's killed by a stranger on the street, it is a crime. A definition that in a nutshell that diminishes the nature and impact of a husband killing his wife, because a man's home is his castle.
Or perhaps Hoeppner isn't aware that most murders are not committed by strangers. The fact is, women are more often than not murdered by the intimate males in their lives. In the seven-year period from 2000 to 2006, more than 500 women in Canada were shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. To provide perspective on these figures: 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers were killed here at home and in Afghanistan during the same period (Figures are from The War on Women: Elly Amour, Jane Hurshman and Criminal Violence in Canadian Homes, by Brian Vallée.)
In Hoeppner's view, it would appear that the gun registry is a dud because it doesn't prevent deaths cause by crime, you know, the Conservative's definition of a "real" crime. But for those of us who are an uneducated lot who call a tragedy a tragedy no matter how it occurs, the gun registry really does seem to have something going for it. Gun deaths have dropped by a third since implementation. And for those even less uneducated of us who think that a murder is a crime -- whether it happens on the street or behind closed doors, it is great value. Police use this tool more than 13,000 times a day. There is a reason for that. That's because unlike Hoeppner, police treat an attempted murder as a crime -- where it happens or by whom and to whom doesn't matter. But, then again, the police and the Conservatives haven't been agreeing on much lately.
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"Uneducated" policemen, who wouldn't know a crime if it hit them, know that a woman is 12 times more likely to be murdered if a gun is involved in domestic violence. They know that they need to remove a gun from someone who is beating up another person. They know if they remove a gun from a premises where a woman and or her children are at risk, they might save their lives. There is a reason for that: statistics from the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee found firearms to be present in 47 per cent of domestic homicides in 2007. They also know that 88 per cent of women shot in domestic violence are shot by a long gun. If police know a registered long gun is on the premises and someone is at risk, it needs to be removed. Guns can kill, period.
At $4 million a year, the gun registry costs two times the price tag of the G8/G20 Fake Lake pavillion. Or if you really want to knuckle down to it -- it costs 10 cents per Canadian per year to operate. Better still, it costs nothing to register a gun and is a simple on-line "operation" (so it won't hurt a bit) that takes no longer than booking a hotel. So let's all pry those two nickels from our cold, cold hands and get on with the business of protecting public safety.
Claire Tremblay is the Co-ordinator of the Ad Hoc Coalition for Women's Equality and Human Rights.
Interesting piece.
Murder statistics (the REAL ones,not the stats they figure they can pull out of their ass in a lame attempt to justify their delusions and paranoia and somehow spread it into the public's psyche),would undoubtedly prove that 'random' murders are EXTREMELY rare in Canada.
Statistics would also prove that there has been a sharp increase of murder/suicides in the past 20 years.
And it's any wonder why this lunatic fringe government is hell bent on scrapping StatsCan?
Or at the very least, scrapping stats that contradict their agenda.
The last 2 paragraphs hit the nail on the head...Excellent points and well delivered.
Canadians need to know that this self professed 'tough on crime' government is interested only in ideologies..NOT facts,statistics or reality.
They also need to know that this government has dismissed women as a 'left wing fringe group' and the police--the very symbol of law and order-- a 'cult' for supporting the gun registry.
This isn't a government...This is a fringe group who have been given the keys to the country by less than 40% of the staggering less than 40% of eligible voters who have turned out to the voting booths in the last 2 elections.
Just when the corporate and union propagandists for the long gun registry seemed to stoop to new lows during the debate over C-391, now you've come along and limboed right under the low bar they set. This out-of-context quote, wrapped up in some sort of smear and packaged in a bizzare conspiracy theory about the census, takes journalism to a new depth of sleazy partisanship.
Hoeppner was referring to the sort of gang and organized crime-related violence and high-profile public shooting incidents (e.g., the Jane Creba slaying and Kimveer Gill attack) which the Firearms Act and gun registry was supposed to prevent. The fact remains that the majority of domestic homocides involve edged weapons, and suicides tend to be comitted with means other than firearms. Where firearms are involved in these incidents, A. they are often unregistered and their owners unlicensed (e.g., a recent incident of a woman shot in her face, at an Edmonton light rail station, by her gangster boyfriend), or B. useless after the fact (someone with a registered firearm, found dead of a suicide that was never predicted). Trying to spin Hoeppner's comment--which could have been better-phrased--into some sort of auto-mysogenist rant is beyond tacky.
The fact is that there IS an escalating problem of domestic violence and homocide, completely unrelated to firearms ownership, which 'progressives' at media outlets like Rabble are deliberately downplaying. Honour killings, such as the Aqsa Parvez tragedy, are becoming more frequent, along with Qur'an-sanctioned spousal battery in many Muslim families. Attire such as the niqab is used to hide the visible signs of women abused by their husbands. There has been a surge in women's shelter and domestic crisis resource useage, by immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Domestic homocides in South Asian families are so common that a group representing Indo-Canadian women in BC has spoken out on the issue. And the origional posterchild for the Firearms Act, Gamil Gharbi (AKA, Mark Lepine), was himself the product of a savagely-abusive Muslim father, who beat his culturally-conditioned contempt for women into his son. The reverse-racist game progressive groups play of deflecting the blame for the politically incorrect problem of immigrant/non-western domestic assault on Christian-Canadian gun owners really isn't helping the female victims of violence that progressives claim to advocate for.
The Census department is a bloated bureacracy, fighting to collect stale data, maintain a massive make-work and porkbarrel IT contract gravy train, and maintain its power to coerce citizens into relealing information they don't want to divulge. The same can be said of the Firearms Centre. 240 jobs (representing FAR more than the fraudulent, $4M cost the RCMP claims) are in place running a registry that hasn't entered about half of the legally-aquired (under the old FAC system) guns in Canada, which has registered soldering guns as 'firearms,' been hacked by organized crime and re-registered stolen firearms as many as THREE TIMES before the error was caught. This is the same database searched by an automated police software protocol "11,000 times per day" on everything from fender-benders to jaywalking tickets, but dismissd as useless by Julian Fantino (OPP), Rick Hanson (Calgary Police Service) and the majority of frontline officers. Yes, the same database that gun registry IT contractor CGI pays the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (headed by your friend, Chief Bill Blair) to lobby on behalf of. And the program Wendy Cukier (recipient of an illegal, $380,000 lobbyist grant from the Chretien government) makes money off of, via RCMP contracts with her IT firm Telecon Consulting. And this database, like its predecessor the (1935-) handgun registry, has not been able to prevent, or solve a crime in its $2B history--something its supporters candidly admit.
The Liberal government cared so much about 'public safety' that they disbanded the Ports police, refused to arm border guards (both invaluable in the interdiction of arms smuggling) and tried to close two RCMP crime labs--as a cost-saving measure. They cared so much about 'women's health' that they slashed breast cancer research funding. And they worried so much about 'women's rights' that they refused to extend spousal rights to First Nations women living on reserves, who enjoy none of the protections regarding shared property and divorce that settler women do. Yet the Liberals are fighting to keep the rotten Firearms Act and gun registry alive. The reason is that Firearms Centre IT contractors CGI and Honeywell donated massively to Chretien's campaign fund.
Rabble claims to abhor the thuggery of Police Chief Bill Blair, yet supports the WARRANTLESS SEARCHES of senior citizens' homes by his officers, of PAL/POL-holders with no criminal records, looking for 'unsafe storage' and unregistered firearms. Rabble once advocated a boycott of the Census, due to an IT contract with a Lockheed-connected firm, but changed its collective mind when the Harper government decided to make the long-form census optional (and the jobs of sponsor PSAC were at stake). Rabbleites proport to stand up for the victims of domestic violence...but only if they're from white, rural, Christian families (even mentioning the term 'honour killings' is verboten on your forums). Rabble progressives believe that corporate funding is 'bad,' except when it comes from U.S. billionaires (George Soros, IANSA's donors at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations), or companies like CGI. The CACP are also completely trustworthy, when they call for maintaining the long gun registry, even though they strenuously argued against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at its introduction. This hypocrisy even extends to things like following the NDP party line of attacking Canada-Colombia free trade (and Colombia's human rights record), but refusing to speak out against the decimation of Canada's manufacturing sector due to free trade with China (or China's ghastly human rights record). It's time for the 'progressives' here to grow spines, quit practicing Doublethink, and figure out what you really stand for.
UPDATE...Yet another shooting spree in the United States at the University of Texas in Austin.
To the Canadian NRA members...Would you PLEASE do this country a great service and pack up your guns and bibles and move to the loonie bin known as the United States.
Atleast there,they have an amendment in their constitution that protects the rights of gun nuts.
DEMENAGE!!
Would you pro-authoritarian statists please leave Canada for someplace more along your ideological preference, like Cuba, or North Korea? These nice countries prohibit civilian firearms ownership--something Allan Rock advocated for Canada. Bibles--and Christianity, in general--are also largely illegal in these Workers' Paradises. It was ten years ago that PET croaked, and we'll all be happier to see his fellow travellers and fans of Fidel 'the murderer' Castro quit destroying Canada with their rotten social engineering schemes.
I'll let others reply to your pathetic rant.
Die already,Charleton...And take your iron male enhancement device with you.