…Whip the fucking vote, Jack. You won’t lose a single vote if you do but you sure as hell will lose votes if you don’t.

If registering long guns serves no purpose then what’s the purpose of registering hand guns?

I predict a yes vote on Bill C-391 that kills the gun registry from Nathan Cullen, Dennis Bevington, Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, and Carol Hughes will cost the New Democratic Party a minimum of $250,000 in donations, 4 percentage points in the polls and at least three of the afforementioned MPs their seats in the House of Commons.

Update: New Democrat MPs are fooling themselves if they believe there will be no repercussions from a yes vote.

If any NDP member votes for this bill, and is not expelled from caucus, then I’m afraid it’s over between us.

Since all the kewl kidz are reflecting on PMS‘ first year anniversay, I thought I’d join in too by rubbing salt in the wounds of his supporters.

A year after the federal Conservatives won power promising to abolish the gun registry, the program is still running - and any hope of killing it before the next election appears to be fading.

Ha ha! And by the way, about that cost.

The RCMP, which took over administration of the gun control program last year, has estimated that the saving from abolishing registration of long guns would be just under $3 million a year.

That figure belies the Tory claim of continued waste and inefficiency, said Wendy Cukier, head of the Coalition for Gun Control.

That it does Wendy, but when it comes to reality conservatives just aren’t that enthusiastic about it.

I hope this is true. Just the rumour of it has the right whingers squawking.

I have been advised by a very credible inside source that the Conservative Party has folded regarding our rights, in light of the recent Dawson College shooting involving legally-registered restricted firearms.

The essence is that all currently-restricted long-guns will be banned.

As I previously said here and here, the Conservatives have, at least with this minority government, begun capitulating on the issue of gun control. PMS knows full well that if he wants to make inroads in urban areas that weakening gun control laws is not the way to go. The fact that it would be yet another betrayal to his rube base is inconsequential to the Conservatives who believe that the ends justifies the means on the road to power.

Update: Cowboys for Social Responsibility has more on the reaction from the wingnuts to this rumour.

If yesterday’s shooting rampage is evidence that gun control doesn’t work then it’s only fair to claim that a day without a shooting rampage is evidence that gun control does work.

This is certain to get the right whingers howling. A study suggests the gun registry helps save Canadian taxpayers as much as $1.4 billion per year.

The Conservatives continue to admit defeat on this issue with their latest attempts to eliminate gun control measures in this country.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has introduced legislation to abolish the long-gun registry, a controversial program they gutted last month.

People will still need licences to buy and own rifles and shotguns, but keeping a central registry was wastefully expensive, he said.

So essentially the entire opposition to gun control in Canada now boils down to nothing more than opposing a database since they’ve decided to maintain the status quo on every other aspect of it. Even though gun control advocates are clearly winning this battle, the elimination of the registry database needs to be opposed as well. This registry database is just as important to Canada’s gun laws as the two Ministry of Transportation registry databases (the motor vehicle registry and driver’s licence registry) are to our nation’s transportation laws.

Consider if you will how the driver’s licence registry database works. It’s simply not enough that you’re in possession of the actual licence when you’re stopped by the police. The licence itself will not tell them if you are legally entitled to drive or if your licence has been suspended on a DUI charge for instance. For that information law enforcement officials must check the registry database.

It’s no different with the gun registry database. Simply possessing a licence is not sufficient enough to allow law enforcement officials to determine if you’re legally entitled to own a firearm. Only an up to date database can do that. This is why the gun registry database needs to be kept and improved so as to provide reliable information to law enforcement officials.

As for those who argue that the gun registry database won’t stop a criminal from using a gun, I would as ask them this. The driver’s licence registry won’t prevent someone who is not legally entitled to drive from doing so but would you argue that it too should be abandoned?

More importantly though is that the measures that are already in place are a fair and equitable compromise between the pro and anti gun control camps. By treating the privalege to own a gun in the exact same manner as the privalege to drive a motor vehicle, a system has been created whereby responsible, law abiding citizens can legally own firearms yet at the same time works to prevent ownership to those who shouldn’t, for various reasons, be allowed to.

This legislation and any other legislation that works to undermine gun control measures in Canada must be opposed. Especially since it’s the pro gun control side, not the anti-gun control side, that now stands on the eve of final victory.

Update: More on the issue.
Tories Add Costs To Gun Registy, Then Bitch About It.
The Tories attempt to kill the gun registry outright.
Gum Control. Please don’t take away my bazooka Joe.

For those who don’t think gun control works the stats prove them wrong. Consider this chart of the long gun homicide rate versus the hand gun homicide rate.

Click graph to enlarge.

New regulations were introduced in 1995 and since that time the long gun homicide rate decreased by half while the handgun homicide rate remained unchanged. The reason for this is simply because there weren’t any new regulations pertaining to hand guns introduced at the same time.

So why do I attribute this decline to the 1995 regulations? For the simple reason that historical gun homicide rates show that previously introduced regulations have also had the same noticeable impact on firearm homicide rates in the past. Examine the graph below.

Click graph to enlarge.

As you can see, the rate of long gun homicides decreased by half over the 20 year period between the mid 70s and mid 90s while the handgun homicide rate remained unchanged. The reason for this decline in the long gun homicide rate was due to the introduction of the Firearms Acquisition Certificate in 1977. This was the first long gun control measure introduced in Canada and it too had a noticeable impact. And once again you’ll notice the hand gun homicide remained unchanged during that time because no significant new regulations were introduced.

There is a direct correlation between the long gun homicide rate in Canada and the various types of gun control measures that have been implemented in the past 3 decades. And it’s clear the regulations introduced in 1995 had their own significant impact as evidenced by the doubled rate of decrease in the long gun homicide rate. Clearly this demonstrates these gun control measures aren’t wasted efforts despite the empty protests of critics who would have you believe otherwise.

The headline from CBC says, “Tories gut Liberals’ gun registry”. But if you dig into the details, you’ll discover that their headline should read, “Tories capitulate on gun registry”.

Lets look at what Harper is planning to do from the CTV article which has more of the details.

The Conservative government announced Wednesday that owners of shotguns and rifles will no longer be required to pay to register their firearms, and those who fail to register their long-guns will not be prosecuted.

A one-year amnesty will be introduced to protect previously-licensed owners of non-restricted firearms from prosecution and to encourage them to comply with the law as it currently stands.

If you’re planning to gut the gun registry it makes no sense to encourage people to register their guns. Declaring an amnesty and waiving the fees is essentially what the Liberals did when the gun registry first came into force in order to get the holdouts to give up the fight. And it’s a sensible move since many will capitulate and finally register their guns.

The government will also bring forward legislation to repeal the registry of non-restricted firearms

Harper knows he doesn’t have the votes to get this through Parliament and by doing it now will only reafirm our committment to the gun registry. It’s an empty gesture directed at the gun registry opponents so he can shrug his shoulders and say he tried.

These are not the actions of someone who is planning to gut the registry. They’re the actions of someone who is giving up the fight but is trying to do so in a manner so as to be able to fool his base into thinking he’s giving, or tried to give, them what they want. The gun registry is here for good and Harper is selling its opponents down the river. Get used to it.

One other thing Harper is planning to do is move the responsibility for the gun registry over to the RCMP. This is a smart move and it’s something the Liberals should have done from the start. Prior to the registry the RCMP were responsible for Canada’s hand gun registry and issuing FACs (firearm acquisition certificates). They did the background checks because they had the expertise to do so.

That’s today’s cost of the gun registry.

The Auditor-General found that:

Its (Canada Firearms Centre) methods of apportioning costs between the licensing and registration activities are reasonable.

This finding means that it is clear that the registration of all firearms in Canada, including rifles and shotguns, handguns, semi-automatic rifles, such as the AK-47, and fully automatic machine guns, costs only $15.7 million annually, or less than a nickel per Canadian per month.

Read the rest of the post at Cowboys For Social Responsibilities. It debunks a lot of the rightwing propaganda being spread about the Auditor General’s report on the gun registry.

Also be sure to check out what several police chiefs had to say about the gun registry. They are the people who use it, not the armchair law enforcement officials on the Blogging Tories blogroll.

Liberal Catnip makes an inciteful observation about the conservatives and the gun registry.

They can complain about the Liberal’s “billion dollar boondoggle” all they want but they sure aren’t the party to talk since they just gave away $1 billion to American lumber companies in the softwood deal.

Exactly. At least the Liberals pissed away the billion over a decade. The Harpercons did it in less than 3 months and whats worse, the conservative caucus and supporters gave it a great big thumbs up.

Speaking of the gun registry, here’s what the leaked auditor general’s report has to say about the state it’s now in.

In her report next week, Ms. Fraser is not expected to reveal more cost overruns at the agency. Instead, she is expected to say the long-running problems are now, finally, under control.

In other words, it’s no longer a financial concern and any complaints about it are nothing more than empty gripes from bitter partisan hacks who hate paperwork.

He’s making the first moves.

Sources say the federal government will announce a one year amnesty for gun owners who fail to register a firearm, or if they let their license expire.

The government will waive the payment of any fees and it will refund the fees paid by gun owners in recent months.

Until the registry is eliminated, responsibility for it will move from the public safety minister, to the RCMP.

Another blunder from Harper. This time he’s getting rid of a successful gun control program for no other reason than his base supporters have an unnatural hatred of paperwork. And the $15 million per year cost of it is easily something we can afford considering it has kept guns out of the hands of thousands of people who shouldn’t have them.

So Stockwell Day says Canadians are going to be shocked when the true cost of the federal gun registry is revealed.

Day told The Canadian Press that figures bureaucrats have shown him during briefings for his new portfolio are much higher than previously thought. He would not divulge what the tab is, but said it’s upsetting.

“Some of these numbers, when we get out all the numbers and when the auditor general releases them all very soon, eyebrows are going to go up,” he said Thursday.

Alright, fair enough. But Canadians should also be shocked at the reasons for this waste of their taxpayer dollars. Will the media report this as well or will they continue to leave Canadians sitting in the dark?

One of the major items on Harper’s campaign platform was that he’d work to further decentralize Ottawa’s power by handing more control over to the provinces. I wonder if he had this in mind when he decided to make it such a big issue?

Ontario’s attorney general says his province should have the right to ban handguns.

Michael Bryant is quoted in Sunday’s Toronto Star as saying that if the federal government does not give the provinces authority to ban the weapons, his province “will have to look at the narrow constitutional opportunities that are available to us.”

According to Bryant, only the police, the military and Olympic sharpshooters should be allowed to have handguns.

Oops, the law of unintended consequences strikes again. While I’m not in favour of the conservative plan to weaken Ottawa and turn Canada into nothing more than a collection of provinces united in name only, I figure as long as he’s going to do it we might as well make sure it’s not just the powers the conservatives want that are returned. That way if Harper does manage to wreak havoc in our nation we can at least insure that Ontario remains a progressive province. And as an added bonus, maybe this type of ban in Ontario will cause some of the conservatives to move to another province. That alone would be worth it.

When the idea of arming our border guards was first pushed into mainstream discussion, I was against the idea for one simple reason. It’s an unjustifiable expense. Arming our border guards will require that they undergo a whole new level of training to be able to properly handle the firearm as well as to be able to identify when it’s appropriate to unholster and possibly use it. In addition to this expense, is the added expense of setting up some form of oversight, similar to what’s in place for our existing law enforcement, to look into any incidents where a border guard must resort to using his firearm.

For more than a hundred years our border with the United States has functioned with little or no problems. I can’t recall of a single incident where a border guard has lost his life and the rate of assault committed against them is negligible. And before anyone brings it up, the recent incident where several guards left their post because of an armed and dangerous criminal being chased toward the border is not really related to border security. Criminals always flee toward the border and the law enforcement of the nation they’re fleeing from is more than capable of handling their own internal matters; as was the case because the incident was resolved even before it hit the US/Canada border.

So I saw very little justification for arming our border guards. Now however, I’ve changed my position soley on the basis that the border guards themselves are asking that they be armed. I worked as a carpenter for many years and one thing that always made my tasks easier was recognition of the fact that you can’t do a proper job if you don’t have the proper tools. I mean, sure you could pound nails in with a rock, but a hammer is simply a far superior tool for the job. And it’s for this reason that I now support the arming of our border guards. They feel that they need them to do a proper job of guarding our borders.

And this is what distinguishes the left from the right when it comes to issues like this. The left recognizes that they don’t know everything and will defer to those who actually do. In the above case, it would be ludicrous of me to insist that I’m more knowledgible than the border guards when it comes to the tools required to do the job. The right however, doesn’t believe this to be true. They believe they know what is required to get the job done better than those who are actually doing the job.

Case in point. The head of Canada’s police chiefs, Jack Ewatski has once again called for the Conservatives to not scrap the federal gun registry. He asserts that it is frequently used by law enforcement officials across the country and has now become one more tool they can use to do a proper job. And true to form, the conservative pundits are claiming they possess superior knowledge when it comes to knowing whether a particular tool of the trade is of any value to our law enforcement officials.

The gun registry has become a political whipping point used by the right to generate hostility toward the Liberals. But the fact is, that it is a tool that law enforcement officials have found to be of value and for the conservatives to continue dismissing this simply for the sake of political gamesmanship shows that they don’t care if our police have the proper tools to do a proper job. When it comes to the gun registry only one group’s opinion now matters; our law enforcement officials who use it every day and PM Harper cannot afford to ignore their opinion on its value. What he can do however, is ignore the opinions of those with no real knowledge pertaining to the value of the gun registry and nothing more than a political agenda to peddle.

So Junker from Celestial Junk wants to know my opinion about gun control and more specifically concealed carry laws. Junker thinks we should all be allowed to pack heat in this country and he claims that statistics show it reduces crime.

What utter hogwash. Let me step into the wayback machine to the time of the American wild west. You’ve all seen the movies depicting the lawlessness that was rampant in that era or read about it in a book. Funny, those people were all allowed to pack heat but it didn’t seem to do them a lick of good, did it?

It’s funny too that whenever you watch a movie or read a book about how the west was cleaned up you’ll notice one of the first things that was done was to take all the people’s guns away. Just think of Wyatt Earp. What was the first step he took in order to clean up Dodge City? He banned everyone but the law from carrying guns in town. After that people could live in Dodge without the fear of being shot dead just because someone thought they looked at them funny.

So why is it that conservatives think returning to the days of the wild west is the right way to go? I don’t know either. I guess they’re just daft.

Yeah, sure they don’t.

Peel Regional Police have arrested a 27-year-old Mississauga man after they seized a cache of weapons last week at an apartment on Arista Way.
Police say they were investigating the trafficking of firearms to members of a gang within the Region of Peel.
Last Wednesday, police raided an apartment on Arista Way, in the Hurontario and Burnamthorpe Rd. E. area, and seized two revolvers, five rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, 30 replicas/pellet guns, 25 various weapons and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Just one more thing the right whingers are wrong about.

Remember all the hysterical predictions from right whingers about how law abiding gun owners were going to be harassed for merely owning a firearm if the gun registry was put into place in Canada? Here, let me refresh your memory with an example of one of them.

The Liberals’ firearms registry violates as many as 17 different sections of the Charter of Rights. The B.C. and Alberta governments should take responsibility for protecting our rights—otherwise thousands of law-abiding gun-owners will be forced to defend themselves against criminal charges in separate trials. These trials will take a heavy financial and emotional toll on individuals. There will be conflicting decisions and appeals. The Alberta and B.C. governments would be doing both the taxpayers and these wrongly accused fellow citizens a favour by consolidating their cases into a single constitutional reference. It would be the quickest and least expensive way to address this important issue, and other provincial and territorial governments could again be recruited to make this a coalition effort.

More than 2 years after this was written and the gun registry came into force, not a single law abiding citizen, let alone thousands of them, has been forced to defend themself from criminal charges. In short, all those dire predictions were just another case of the right peddling lies and scary scenarios of doom to the public in order to sway them to their point of view. And just like every other case where the right whingers employ this scare tactic, they were one hundred percent wrong.

The gun registry in this country has come under fire, mostly from the right, because its opponents believe that it doesn’t serve a purpose. This of course is wrong. The gun registry is a valuable tool, used more and more often, that law enforcement agencies in this country rely on to combat crime. Here is just one example of the gun registry in action.

First however, you need to know how the gun registry works in conjunction with sections 91(1) and 92(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada.

Unauthorized possession of firearm
91. (1) Subject to subsections (4) and (5) and section 98, every person commits an offence who possesses a firearm, unless the person is the holder of
(a) a licence under which the person may possess it; and
(b) a registration certificate for the firearm.

Punishment
(3) Every person who commits an offence under subsection (1) or (2)
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years; or
(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

Possession of firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized
92. (1) Subject to subsections (4) and (5) and section 98, every person commits an offence who possesses a firearm knowing that the person is not the holder of
(a) a licence under which the person may possess it; and
(b) a registration certificate for the firearm.

Punishment
(3) Every person who commits an offence under subsection (1) or (2) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable
(a) in the case of a first offence, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years;
(b) in the case of a second offence, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of one year; and
(c) in the case of a third or subsequent offence, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of two years less a day.

These two sections of the criminal code were added as part of the new Firearms Act, since under the old act it was only an offence to possess prohibited and restricted weapons without a licence. In order for these new laws to work though, there had to be a way to determine if someone was legally in possession of a firearm. Hence the gun registry. Without it, the police in this country simply wouldn’t be able to determine if a person was legally in possession of a non prohibited or non restricted weapon. Now however, they can simply search the registry database and if the person is not authorized to possess the firearm, they can charge them with one or both of the above offences.

And such was the case when charges were laid by the Metro Toronto Police after they put Project Flicker into action.

Several dozen gang-member suspects were arrested in a 300-officer strong series of early morning raids in Toronto on Wednesday in an operation that police have dubbed “Project Flicker.”

Officers executed more than 40 search warrants in the raids, covering alleged offences ranging from attempted murder and armed robbery to firearms, trafficking and fraud in their blitz on street gangs and gun violence.

There were a total of 1325 charges laid in these raids and among them were 57 charges from section 91(1) and 7 charges from section 92(1) of the criminal code. Without the gun registry, it wouldn’t have been possible for the police to lay these 64 charges against these dangerous criminals.

This is our gun registry in action. It works like this every day to aid the police in making our nation safer by giving them the tools they need to take dangerous criminals off our streets.