Farewell, So Long, Too Bad We Knew You
MPs vote to scrap long-gun registry
MPs voted by a clear margin Wednesday to repeal the federal long-gun registry, signalling for the first time since the program was adopted 14 years ago that it is headed for the scrap heap, despite police assertions that it saves lives.
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The bill passed by a surprising 164-137 margin, winning more supporters than expected.
What can I say…. good job folks!
I know, I know, how very unprogressive of me – my views on both the long gun registry and gun control in general are, at least for those who know me, fairly well known, I am not a fan, and this is progress.
Well, join me in the pariah’s chamber.
http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2009/11/note-on-gun-registry.html
Thought I might be alone. You fascist.
@Dr.Dawg: Somewhere along the way, and I’m at a loss as to even guess when that might have happened, the term “progressive” apparently came to mean “against anything Conservatives are doing today” IOW, a Liberal (or a Dipper), or a socialist, or a communist – it probably happened about the same time as the term conservative came to mean anti-Liberal.
…. but once again a few of us defy the hyper-partisan box ‘eh?
As you so aptly pointed out in your post long guns are used primarily for things like hunting, and not committing murders. The registry serves no purpose other than to waste our tax dollars intruding into our lives by databasing unnecessary information on millions honest, hardworking, Canadian citizens, who have little, or no, likelihood of doing anything more than target shooting, feeding their families, or keeping the varmints out of the hen house.
Yeah, yeah – get a room.
Everybody’s a law-abiding hunter until he shoots his wife and kids. And you’re right, collecting data on millions of honest, hardworking Canadian citizens (as opposed to us Feminist anti-gun city-slickers, I guess) is pretty pointless when lying scumbag operatives of the NRA are busily sabotaging the system and not registering their guns.
The problem wasn’t a gun registry. The problem was this particular gun registry.
And if we’ve got so damned many honest, hardworking Canadians in this country, how did we end up with such a dishonest and incompetent government? I hereby nominate “honest, hardworking Canadians” as overused line of the millenium.
As a long time hunter I am somewhat offended by that. When did it happen? And if it did would the fact that a rifle was in some federal government database prevent some nutter from squeezing the trigger?
And if we went the whole 9 yards and banned all guns it still wouldn’t stop the nutters would it? We’d have to add banning cars, pillows, and knives.
Cars are used primarily for transportation and not for hit-and-run assaults or as quick getaways from crime scenes.
Boats are used primarily for fishing, transportation and sport and not for smuggling drugs, weapons or human cargo.
Dogs are used primarily for companionship and not for attacking or dog-fighting.
Corporations are used primarily for deriving honest income and not for concealing profits and dodging taxes.
I register my car, my boat, my dog and my business. Since there is no big American lobby group like the NRA stirring the pot, those encroachments on my personal freedom go uncontested. Why are guns different? Because we’re being manipulated by US lobbyists and their agents.
Maybe if we can get our gun laws in line with the US, we can enjoy crime and murder rates similar to those of our southern neighbours.
JB
Shortly after the Dawson shooting, the police used the registry to identify the shooter, other weapons (all legally owned) he possessed, and track down someone else who threatened online to also go out and shoot up the citizenry. The feeling in Quebec is much different because of this and the Polytechnique massacre.
As a longtime hunter as well, I don’t see it a massive intrusion into my privacy if part of my responsibility as an owner is to register a weapon that can kill people as well as wild game. I know too many people whose weapons have been stolen, too many people who have “fixed” (automatic) assault rifles that they bought as collectors or for hunting(?), have lived in communities where too many people have been the targets of these types of weapons.
I can’t put into words, how happy I am that this monster is finally dead. I go red in the face when I think of all the good that wasted cash could have done if it had been applied elswhere. The registry was a disaster from the beginning and served no useful purpouse so killing it was long overdue. Now if only we can do the same to the CHRC and CBC, we might get back to running a country that respects it’s population, instead of looking at them as simply a massive sea of manipulatable cash cows who’s only purpouse is to keep the treasury full and the Liberals in power.
JimBobby:
I’ve never heard anybody argue that we need to register cars, boats, corporations or dogs in order to monitor or restrict who has access to them or consider whether they really have a good reason for them. Surely we aren’t going to pretend this bureaucratic and financial nightmare was just about registration and licensing fees. And what were the feds doing involved with this?
@shmohawk –
Shortly after the Dawson shooting, the police used the registry to identify the shooter, other weapons (all legally owned) he possessed, and track down someone else who threatened online to also go out and shoot up the citizenry.
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How did the long gun registry identify this student? No one at his school knew him?
How did it track down someone else threatening to do the same?
Just giving my 2 cents worth. I have two hand guns and two long guns. I don’t have an ideological problem with gun registration, I do have a problem with how inefficiently it was carried out costing hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.
Plus I believe it is important the cops know what bikers own guns.
@Peter –
I’ve never heard anybody argue that we need to register cars, boats, corporations or dogs in order to monitor or restrict who has access to them or consider whether they really have a good reason for them.
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I have…many times. I call that one the “why not?” argument; when unable to formulate a reasonable, rational, and (most importantly) defensible position on something, just fall back to the tried and true “why not?”. Sorry, but like you I need something more. Give me facts, not conjecture. Give me evidence, not hypothetical situations. If you can’t do either, you have no case no matter how passionately you try to argue it.
The arguments have been cited many times, notably by the Association of Canadian Police Chiefs. They include: helping reduce the sale of legally owned weapons to “illegal” owners; letting police know if there are guns in a home when they answer a call; proof of illegal possession of a firearm, and providing a trail when weapons are stolen from registered gun owners.
And the registry didn’t prevent anyone from owning a legal weapon so what’s your real point? It was a fiasco in large part because “law-abiding” gun owners deliberately sabotaged it with help from the American NRA invoking the long exposed American myth of the right to bear arms. That strikes me as more of a “why not” argument than any argument in support of it.
American right-wing gun nuts are now trying to protect the right of foreigners to bear arms? The Green Mountain Boys must be rolling in their graves.
There was a very good comment over at bigcitylib’s site asking anyone if they could ever recall a time when the police said no, they really didn’t need the information in question..
The police put a name to the (at first) unidentified gunman through his registered weapon after securing the scene. As for how police used the registry to track down someone issuing an online threat, why don’t you call the Montreal Police or the Surete du Quebec for details. I’m just passing on what I read in the newspapers at the time of the Dawson College shootings. Not sure of your point though. Are you questioning whether police should have used the registry in this way at all?
All this debate about why or why not, misses the whole point. The state should not be in the business of registering private property, period. No cars, no boats, no guns. What you own, is yours, not theirs. Give me one good reason why the government should know how many cars you have? What possible difference should it make too them? What about boats, or motorcycles, or anything else for that matter? The argument, when this point is raised invariably falls back to:
“well, if we didn’t register things, how would the police know who it belongs too if it is stolen?” or some such nonsense. To which the reply is simple. Make sure you can prove it is yours. End of story. No need for sticky tags on licence plates, no need for gun registries, and no need for the millions of dollars spent on all these obtrusive programs that are outside the purvue of the state in the first place.
The only ground I would give on this front, is that cars should have plates so that the police can record the number for prosecution later for minor crimes involving traffic violations. That is it. Never forget that we are born free men, and only submit ourselves to the authority of the state insofar as it is in our best interests to do so in matters of defense and dealing with national issues that the individual cannot practially do himself. We need to draw a line in the sand and tell our elected officials, “this far, and no further” and killing the gun registry is as good a place to start as any.
Who’s “we”? Too funny – car plates so the police can track minor traffic violations, but no gun registry. And we aren’t born free men, we’re born as babies belonging to our parents and over the years we are socialized to live cooperatively with other people. It’s called civilization.
@Nick –
Since the conept of being born “free men” is not apparant to you, let me explain. The statement beign born free men, means that as individuals, we only surrender a certain amount of our freedom to the state insofar as it benefits us. That is to say that we allow our freedoms to be impinged upon for the good of all of us. This is exactly the opposite of being born as slaves, and having the state grant us certain freedoms with the unspoken understanding that they can be taken away from us at the gvernments discretion. Since we are supposed to be operating under the idea of being free with certain limits imposed and having the state subservient to the people they govern, it follows then, that there should be very clear limits on where the state ends and where the person begins. Things like the right to own, use and enjoy the benefits of private property, land vehicles pets, and so on, are normally beyond teh reach of the government and fall under the catagory of “none of their damn business”. That is what being born “Free men” means.
Can you be born “Free men” if you were born with internal plumbing, or is this option only open to those with external plumbing?
How exactly does genitalia figure into this fascinating calculus of yours?
Tell us more of this “Free Men” utopia, are there any taxes involved?
@sooey -
|The arguments have been cited many times, notably by the Association of Canadian |Police Chiefs.
Political appointees all, who take their orders from the politicians they work for.
|They include: helping reduce the sale of legally owned weapons to “illegal” owners;
Already illegal, and no one who jumped through the hoops to obtain first an FAC then later a Firearms License would be selling any of their guns illegally, sorry. This is one of the biggest flaws in the arguments of the anti-gun hysterics: the people most likely to register their firearms are the *least likely* to abuse them.
|letting police know if there are guns in a home when they answer a call;
Police really laugh at this one, actually. What are they going to do…leave their own guns in the car? Assume that there are no illegal guns on site, so they don’t need to worry? As for the oft-used excuse that “it make it possible to remove firearms from domestic abuse situations”, they *already* had that capability with the Firearms License and prior FAC (which, BTW, you can’t get without citing the names of past wives/girlfriends as references to be vetted by the police).
|proof of illegal possession of a firearm,
Again, already covered by existing law.
|and providing a trail when weapons are stolen from registered gun owners.
You don’t seriously believe that one, do you? Registered gun owners already have the serial numbers of their own guns, which could easily be provided if they are stolen. A cynic might say that the police will be more interested in trying to lay charges against the gun owner for having the gun stolen (improper storage); witness the recent furor over the Asian shopkeeper chasing down and confining the shoplifter…
@shmohawk –
The police put a name to the (at first) unidentified gunman through his registered weapon after securing the scene. As for how police used the registry to track down someone issuing an online threat, why don’t you call the Montreal Police or the Surete du Quebec for details. I’m just passing on what I read in the newspapers at the time of the Dawson College shootings. Not sure of your point though. Are you questioning whether police should have used the registry in this way at all?
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That’s not what I read, but identifying him after he had killed himself isn’t notably helpful (the suicide note he was carrying would have done that just fine) anyway. And I can’t find reference to the registry being used to track down anyone else involved in this…a *website*, yes…not the registry.
My point is the utter uselessness of this bureaucratic boondoggle, frankly. Not one person (law enforcement, government or otherwise) has ever been able to point to a crime prevented or solved by this thing (excluding, of course, the crime of possessing an unregistered gun; let’s be adult about this…;). Good riddance to it.
Enh. I call bullshit, Fred. If the Reform Party had come up with the gun registry, my guess is you’d be elbowing people out of the way to register your weapons.
By the way, Audrey McLaughlin was pretty much on the side of the long arms. I doubt any one of you here voted for her.
As Gilda Radner so famously said, “It’s always something”.
@Naked Ape –
I would have thought that the term would be understood to apply equally to both genders.
This qualifies as one of the most sensible comments I’ve seen on the nanny state in quite some time.
Funny. It qualifies as nutsofacto to me. Who’s the state, first of all…
@sooey –
|Enh. I call bullshit, Fred. If the Reform Party had come up with the gun registry,
|my guess is you’d be elbowing people out of the way to register your weapons.
You’d be wrong, but thanks for playing. Next time try not to let your ego write cheques that your intellect can’t cash…