The OFAH reports that, “On April 7, 2007, an order amending the amnesty period for registration of long guns appeared in the Canada gazette, which formally extends the deadline for long gun owners across Canada to register their firearms. The current amnesty was set to expire on May 16, 2007 and the government has extended the period for long gun owners to come into compliance with the law without fear of reprisal to May 16, 2008. ” That’s great, but let’s move onto legislation the impacts criminals (the actual people who use guns for evil deeds).

I noticed that some Democrats in Pennsylvania are trying to push legislation that looks like a carbon-copy waste of 1-billion dollars that the Liberal Government pushed on Canadian citizens. It is called the Canadian Gun Registry. Read Tom’s post at the Black Bear Blog for more details. If you live in that State you may wish to look into what is being proposed.

You may want to tell this level of Government that they are wasting their money on something that will not impact criminals like drug dealers, gang members, armed robbers, terrorists, and anyone else intent on committing a crime with a gun.

As a gun owner, this is what really irritates me about our current Canadian gun laws. It took one-billion dollars for the Liberals to make a registry that made Canadians believe they are safer because, for some reason, the expectation is that all the evil doers, mentioned in the previous paragraph, are actually going to register their guns. These same people will comply by taking a gun safety course and flaunt their shiny new photo-id card to police or unsuspecting victims. Maybe, we could get terrorists to register their weapons so that the world would be a better place?

I read an editorial in the Toronto Sun today. The thrust of the article recognized that the Government spent too much money on a registry that was supposed to cost 2 million dollars. However, it did indicate that there is value in what was done. It says,

The fact is the registry is used regularly — as often as 7,000 times daily by some counts — by police services, who support it. And some polls show a growing majority of Canadians support it. Entire Article

I disagree. I am not the only one. It’s true some police services support our current waste of money, but read this article that highlights what other police services and police officers are saying about the Federal Registry. This statement sheds some light on the quote I listed from the Toronto Sun,

Though the chiefs of police may endorse it, as a working police officer in Toronto for 33 years, I found the long gun registry terribly flawed and a waste of time, energy and money. It needs to be dismantled, not strengthened. For the last six years, I worked the streets of the Jane-Finch area, so I’ve attended my share of weapons calls. Not once did I ever seek or rely on information from the gun registry. It was irrelevant. Your statement that it is used 5,000 times a day by police is misleading. A check of the registry is done automatically every time an officer is dispatched to an address, wanted or not. From its inception, I was advised not to depend on it to make decisions. It is outdated, inaccurate and completely unreliable. To make a decision at a call based on registry information would be foolish at best and deadly at worst.

Entire Article Here.

I am also pretty sure the majority of Canadians do not agree with $1-billion dollars (of their money) being wasted.

The other thing that bugs me about Gun Control is that there seems to be a group of people that thinks it is logical to attempt to ban guns outright. A noble gesture. For those of us who obey the laws of the land and turn over our guns we would quickly find out that we would be pawns on a chess board where it is only Goverments and criminals who have guns. That sounds like fun. A gun beside my bed to greet the thief is always better than a SWAT team enroute (to intervene) in 15 minutes.

Instead, there must be a better way to spend 1 billion dollars that will acually target criminals. It could support victims of gun crime, create education programs, intiate social programs that could help communities reach out to its members who use guns illegally. It could even go towards developing better detection and security measures for police forces. Heck, we could have left the registration system we had in place, before the Liberals’ NEW system, and made a $1,000,000,000 donation to cancer research. That would make a difference!

Anyways, that’s my opinion.

Bill Anderson - Muskoka Outdoors