Here is the Harpocrites messaging on the Long Gun Registry that has not changed since the election, nor since this summer. Despite the recent shooting in Montreal it continues to be the message from the government and their media syncophants.
"Duck-hunters, farmers and law-abiding gun owners do not pose a threat to Canadians, criminals do,"
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said.
Justice Minister Vic Toews
That fight — the battle to ban the assault weapon that allowed Marc Lepine to murder his 14 victims in the blink of an eye — was a torturous fiasco, no matter which “side” you took.
The initial impulse, from traumatized students, from grieving families, from concerned Canadians everywhere, was just to do something to prevent dangerous characters from getting their hands on deadly weapons and ammo so easily.
But it somehow morphed into a billion-dollar registry that threatened to turn duck hunters and farmers into criminals — wasteful nonsense that neither satisfied nor protected anyone.
Shootings don’t vindicate gun registry
Some nut-bar with an illegal, automatic weapon opens fire on students at the downtown college, and supporters of the registry suggest it’s proof we need to keep forcing duck hunters and farmers to register their rifles and shotguns.
The message is clear duck hunters and farmers are the Tories electoral base. Not urban Canadians.
According to the 2001 Census there were 313,000 farmers in Canada, a population in decline.
And there is a severe decline in duckhunters in Canada.
In little more than a couple decades, two of every three duck hunters in Canada have vanished and the free- fall in numbers shows no sign of slowing. Sales of Migratory Bird Hunting Permits in Canada rose from 380,059 in 1966, peaking at 524,946 in 1978, before starting a long ride down to 197,584 in 1999. The outlook for the Canadian waterfowl hunting heritage is bleak. Hugh Boyd, Scientist Emeritus with the Canadian Wildlife Service has used population projections from Statistics Canada, and trends in permit sales to predict the number of waterfowl hunters in the future. His figures show that the number of duck hunters will continue to decline from 1999 levels, by 17% in the next two years, 49% in 7 years and by 64% over the next 10 years. Boyd also considered the influence of age in the trends. He found that the sharpest drops were occurring in the 15 to 24 year old age class, followed by 25 to 34 year olds. Projected permit sales for the 2001 season in these age classes are 14,100 and 19,700 respectively. There are zero sales of migratory bird hunting permits projected for persons under 35 years of age in 2006.
So this is who the Tories are courting with their pandering to get rid of the Long Gun registry, a disappearing population of less than a half million voters. Now I would call that a special interest group. Good luck in getting a majority next election.
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Tags
shootings, Montreal, DawsonCollege, CGEP, gunregistry, gun-contol, murder, crime, Canada, Quebec, Harper, Conservatives, Government, Toews, Gill, Dawson, College, CGEP, Montreal, Massacre, shooting, crime, Columbine,Toews, farmers,duckhunters,
1 comment:
People in cities don't benefit from the gun registry, aside from those who got the money to design the bloated database and process the long complicated forms. The registry in theory isn't bad, but the implementation was a sham, scam, and should be put on the nearest tram to Defunctville.
And as the shooting in Montreal so clearly points out, as Harper chose to note as diplomatically as possible - The laws we have now concerning guns are ineffective, and he'll try to make them more effective. I don't see how registering a 50 year old .22 on a farm outside of Maple Creek is going to make someone living in Newmarket feel safer. Especially since the database costs so much to operate, and could have been designed by a talented undergraduate Computer Science student for $100,000 in a semester. And don't the guns have to be reregistered every so often too? What's the point of that other than to tax owners of legal guns?
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On another note, your blog is the slowest to load of any I visit. It also has popups that are blocked, and still one that circumvents Firefox's popup blocker, which is one trick that makes me very reluctant to return to a site peddling spyware/security circumvention tricks.
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