IT guy, code monkey, husband, father, target shooter, but unfortunately not independently wealthy.
Ever since I was sent an internal RCMP memo penned by T. G. Killam, the deputy commissioner who is responsible for the Canadian Firearms Program, telling members to keep their opinions of the registry to themselves I have begun to wonder just how deeply the RCMP is in bed with the gun control lobby.
Sadly, the more I look the more unseemly evidence of collusion I find.
- Rafael.Like most people, I often suspect certain machinations are afoot behind the scenes of our various public policy debates. It isn’t all that often, however, that I’m handed a smoking gun, as it were.
There has been considerable press given to the intervention in the C-391 debate by the CACP, CAPB and CPA and over how “police” from coast to coast to coast support the usefulness of the long gun registry.
But what would you say if police were actually being muzzled?
- Rafael.Its been a while since I blogged – mainly because things have been in much of a holding pattern for the past while and because there wasn’t much going on. Oh I know, there have been a least a dozen attempts at lame “scandals” as of late but it seems that Canadians are a little more interested in their day to day lives than they are in what happens to taliban fighters when they’re handed over to their countrymen, what some former-MP is doing in his spare time, or any of the other things the opposition is trying to make stick.
I have, however, been following C-391, a private members’ bill to scrap the wasteful gun registry, fairly closely. It passed first and second readings fairly easily, moving on to committee. Mark Holland, the liberal critic on the committee has done his best to scuttle the fair deliberation of the act by purposefully omitting supporters of C-391 from the proposed list of witnesses. In fact, his original witness list had only 4 witnesses in favor of C-391 and dozens that didn’t.
The latest bit of political trickery is a bit much though.
Today Canadian Association of Police Chiefs President and Toronto Police Service Chief Bill Blair led a press conference in which the CACP, together with the Canadian Association of Police Boards (CAPB) and the Canadian Police Association (CPA), officially endorsed the registry.
- Rafael.I don’t often post related to firearms but the recent spate of letters and comments in the press from the Coalition for Gun Control and the Canadian Chiefs of Police has been getting on my nerves. While they might like to claim that the gun registry is necessary for the safety of women the fact of the matter is that gun owners are – statistically – less likely to harm their spouses.
To top it off, the firearms registry is responsible for draining precious resources that could otherwise be used to prevent domestic abuse.
Statistics Canada’s 2008 report on Family Violence shows only 40 of over 38,000 incidents of domestic violence involved firearms. In other words, 99.92% of spousal assaults didn’t involve guns. In instances where spousal abuse involved physical violence, firearms were used against women 34 times and against men 6 times out of over 17,000 violent assaults.
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
I don’t think there’s anything I can add to last year’s post, so I will repost it.
Two minutes. At the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month.
Its a trifling sum to pay for the countless ranks of Canada’s sons and daughters in distant graveyards and under forgotten battlefields. But it is, remarkably, the only price asked for such monumental sacrifice.
Every year the dwindling ranks of veterans turn out in force to mark Remembrance Day. Every year there are fewer men marching, fewer men standing at attention. Fewer men who carry the weight in their hearts of seeing the horrors on the bloody shores of Europe, the frozen wastelands of Korea, and of the carnage of dozens of other places we seem to forget too quickly.
Lest we forget.
We are the last generation that will have known the veterans of the First World War. With time the same will be true for veterans of the Second World War.
The freedom we so often take for granted was paid for most dearly. The payment asked in return is modest; the debt is worth repaying.
At the going down of the sun, we will remember them.
We will remember. We will always remember.
- Rafael.
2010 © Rafael Gomez.