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Columnists

Gun registry is not a threat to freedom

On a list of favourite activities, renewing my car registration would rank rather low. Still, having done it recently, I can attest that it didn't feel like an assault on my freedom.

Other car owners with me in line seemed similarly undisturbed, apparently realizing this was part of a rather sensible system of licensing and registering drivers and vehicles in an attempt to ensure that the powerful, motorized vehicles we drive at great speeds kill and injure fewer people.

Yet, strangely, this week parliamentarians seem set to vote for a Conservative private member's bill to scrap a registry that provides a similar system of regulatory control -- but for a product that is far more likely to kill.

Columnists

The politics of gun control in the U.S.

"Non-Violence" (a.k.a. "The Knotted Gun"). Photo: Al_HikesAZ/Flickr

Another mass murder, another shooting spree, leaving bodies bullet-riddled by a legally obtained weapon. This time, it was Oak Creek, Wis., at a Sikh temple, as people gathered for their weekly worship. President Barack Obama said Monday, "I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching." Amidst the carnage, platitudes. With an average of 32 people killed by guns in this country every day -- the equivalent of five Wisconsin massacres per day -- both major parties refuse to deal with gun control. It's the consensus, not the gridlock, that's the problem.

Columnists

The need for better gun control laws in the U.S.

Houston gun show. Photo: M Glasgow/Flickr

James Holmes, the alleged shooter in the massacre in Aurora, Colo., reportedly amassed his huge arsenal with relative ease. Some of these weapons were illegal as recently as eight years ago. Legislation now before Congress would once again make illegal, if not the guns themselves, at least the high-capacity magazines that allow bullets to be fired rapidly without stopping to reload. Holmes bought most of his weaponry within recent months, we are told. Perhaps, if sane laws on gun control, including the ban on high-capacity magazines, were in place, many in Aurora who are now dead or seriously injured would be alive and well today.

Syed Hussan

T.O.: Youth get shot, cops get cash

| July 24, 2012
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