... and I haven't been a Liberal since I was 15 and worked on a campaign the first time Pierre Trudeau ran for Prime Minister. Well ... there was that brief interlude a couple of years later when we formed a Young Liberal Club on campus so we could get money to use for the Vietnam Moratorium and our impending strike over the firing of a professor ... and damned if he wasn't a Liberal, although we weren't.
Of course, the Firearms Registry isn't one of the things that make me ashamed of the Liberal Party. Its apparent incompetence in implementing the registry, well yeah, that's kind of shameful. But heck, I didn't vote for the bastards, so I don't really have to be ashamed.
"So an old women who's husband died and had
a gun collection that she wanted to keep to give
to kids or whatever is worthless because it costs
to much to register plus yearly fees."Ah, such sad stories. And this "old woman", her kids would be, what, about 12 years old? Delayed menopause, I assume, resulted in those kids being too young to just inherit the damned things themselves. And what would she be doing if he'd left a motorcycle collection? Bitching about the licence and registration fees? How much would she be complaining about the insurance premiums for the art collection she wants the "kids" to get, and to whom would she be complaining? Cripes, unless he's one of those ones with the 300+ firearms who skew the surveys, you're saying that $50 a year is going to make her homeless?
My mum lives on the bare minimum old-age supplement thingy, and I assure you that if my dad had had firearms when he died earlier this year (ha, about as likely as him ... well, let's just say the probability was nil), she'd have been able to come up with a coupla hundred for the fees. I mean, did the "old man" die penniless leaving only a bunch of guns? Well, no wonder she can't afford the licensing fees -- he spent it all on guns! And I'd think she'd be happy to sell the things for grocery money, if she were truly that hard up.
Remember, this "old woman" of yours doesn't have to pay for prescription drugs; this is Canada. And me, I'm quite happy to let her pay for licensing her firearms out of the old-age pension I pay for out of my taxes, after I've paid for her prescriptions, and possibly subsidized her rent, and paid for her health care of course, out of my income taxes. I think that's very fair and generous of me, actually.
"The theory of this is that if a bank robber uses a gun they can stop crime. Ok. So assuming he fires a bullet, they match it to a Smith And Wessen gun. So the registry shows the 100's of thousands of people who own the gun and voila. Look how much easier the case is. Now they know which 100 thousand people it could be!!! Well that's assuming of course that the bank robber has even registered his of course and I mean who wouldn't register there gun when about to commit a crime?"What a fine and flowery story. I wonder why your Liberal Party would have been so stupid as not to have thought of this, and to have just gone and saddled us with the Firearms Registry for the hell of it all.
I know that this is the line that the registry's opponents like to use, fabricating their own "reasons" for the existence of the registry and the imposition of registration requirements and all. It would be so much ...
nicer ... if they tried addressing the actual purposes of the registry and of registration requirements, I always think. Straw folk being so easy to knock down, and such inappropriate characters in civil discourse, and all.
I wonder whether you're aware of any actual facts that might be germane to the discussion of the merits of firearms registration.
Here's what one of your Liberals had to say on the matter back in 1995, when Bill C-68 was being debated in Parliament:
Mr. Jesse Flis (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lib.): Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to debate Bill C-68, an act to restrict firearms and other weapons.
... All told, it seems the main objection to Bill C-68 is the proposed registration system. It does not matter how many times the minister has said registration does not mean confiscation. The purpose of registration is to limit access to firearms, to promote their safe use and storage and to control their movement. Careless ownership does cost lives. For example, the gun that killed Constable Todd Bayliss in June of 1994 was stolen from an Etobicoke widow. The gun was left lying on a shelf in her closet and was easy prey for the thief who stole it.
While there are many responsible gun owners who follow safe storage rules, far too many do not. The registration system will require all gun owners to be responsible. I do not think any legitimate gun owner worth his or her salt would disagree with safety measures which would prevent children from having accidents with carelessly stored firearms or from keeping loaded weapons out of the hands of criminals on a smash and dash, break and enter. The registration system coupled with increased border controls will make it far more difficult for criminals to access prohibited weapons.
Damn -- an "old woman" with a firearm who shouldn't have to pay all that money! Nope, I guess she should just be able to leave guns lying around in her closet where they can get stolen and used to kill cops. And as long as nobody knows that she has them, that's pretty much exactly what we can expect her to do ... given that she's already done it.
Just about exactly a year before the date of that debate in the House, Nicholas Battersby, a visiting British engineer, was shot dead on a downtown street in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, in a drive-by shooting by a teenager who had stolen the firearm used in the killing from a private home ... where it was unsafely and illegally stored. (These things really are quite rare in Canada's capital, for anyone who might marvel that a Canadian should actually claim, with a straight face, to remember the details of such a minor incident.)
Here we have another one of those PROBLEMS that many of us think require EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS. Telling the bad guys not to break into people's houses and steal guns just doesn't seem to be working, as an EFFECTIVE SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of people getting shot dead with firearms stolen from homes, d'ya think? Telling men not to stalk and shoot their estranged wives and girlfriends dead doesn't work too well either, to all appearances.
Maybe bringing those folks and their firearms into the spotlight of public scrutiny, requiring that they comply with the rules and providing sanctions for non-compliance, making it possible to remove firearms from their possession if they demonstrate that it is dangerous to other people for them to be in possession of firearms --
none of which is possible if nobody knows they even possess firearms -- might save a few lives.
Do we sometimes need to balance the likelihood of saving lives, and the potential number of lives saved, against the cost of achieving that goal? Sure we do. Worthy causes competing for scarce resources and all that.
If a cause is worthy, and deserving of resources, but overruns its costs to the point of being a boondoggle, is further investment just throwing good money after bad, as is often said about the firearms registry at this point?
Not necessarily. If the money wasn't "bad" in the first place -- if the purpose for which it was spent was worthwhile (and Canadian society very, very definitely believes that a firearms registry is worthwhile) -- then that purpose
is still worthwhile.
Spending ever more money to accomplish something that couldn't have been accomplished in the first place -- say, paying the psychic for more readings after the first reading didn't work --
that is "throwing good money after bad". Determining that a worthy cause isn't sufficiently worthy to be allocated the resources that have become necessary in order to achieve a goal, that's just cutting your losses and quitting while you're at least ahead of where you would be if you kept on spending.
The money spent on the firearms registry has been spent. Done deal. Get over it everybody, and all that. I mean, hold someone accountable if possible -- no problem with that. But abandon the project, and all the money already spent on it, when the project is still a worthy cause? Not exactly sensible.
Two different issues.
- Is the project a worthy cause?
- Have unjustifiably large amounts of money been spent on it?
If the answer to the second question is "yes", that does not automatically mean that the answer to the first question is "no". Unfortunately, saying that it is, is what the Canadian equivalents of the NRA would like to pass off as rational argument, and it ain't.
And when it comes to unworthy things that Liberals spend tax money on, well, I'd be looking more in the direction of public subsidies given to owners of private golf courses who happen to be old buddies of the Prime Minister ...
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The decisions of various provinces not to enforce the registration law are pure politics-playing. Even in Alberta, a majority of the public supports the law. As in a whole lot of other things, provincial governments (and I'm sad to count NDP governments among this current batch) can be counted on to oppose the federal government no matter what, and in the case of Liberal and Conservative provincial governments, to represent loud, wealthy special interest groups at every opportunity (the NDP ones seem to have succumbed to pressure that they should have stood up to). Quelle surprise that they are doing it in this instance. Quelle greater surprise that any progressive people would support their decisions.
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