The Canadian Shooting Sports Association invited Glen Caroline, director of the NRA’s grassroots division, to be a keynote speaker and is give a seminar. Wendy Cukier (I wrote about her before) and other anti-freedom advocates are all bent out of shape about it. They apparently have a problem with freedom of association and freedom of speech as well as freedom to keep and bear arms.  From The Star:

U.S. gun lobbyist here to `counsel’

Canadian shooting group enlists NRA Official denies interfering with election

Nice.  The paper doesn’t say the NRA is interfering in the election–they just plant that thought by saying the Canadian shooting group denies it.  Mahatma Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, and Mother Therese would have denied being mass murderers too.

Dec. 3, 2005. 01:00 AM

BETSY POWELL
CRIME REPORTER

A crime reporter!  How appropriate for a political story.

…

But Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, said she’s astonished by the blatancy of the NRA’s involvement because the group’s influence in jurisdictions outside the United States, while well known to people who monitor gun control issues, is not as familiar to the public at large.

“I don’t think the average Canadian understands how powerful the gun lobby is,” in opposing attempts to block tightening of gun control legislation and bans on handgun sales, the Ryerson professor said.

“It is ironic because it’s three days before the anniversary of the Montreal massacre, it’s in Toronto where most people are currently preoccupied with trying to prevent gun violence.”

The NRA has a well-established tradition of “interfering” in other countries, Alun Howard, of the International Action Network on Small Arms, said yesterday by phone from London, England. “We’ve seen them working in Central America … their arguments have appeared in England and Australia, so it’s certainly a worrying trend that the NRA has gone global.”

Most recently, the NRA’s influence was credited — or blamed, depending on your viewpoint — with influencing the outcome of Brazil’s national referendum in October on a proposal to ban the sale of guns.

In a country with one of the world’s highest firearm murder rates, the proposal was soundly rejected.

NRA public affairs director Andrew Arulanandam said yesterday that the organization is only too happy to provide “counsel” to organizations in other countries to help ensure that “gun rights” prevail around the world, adding “we’re really heartened with what happened in Brazil.”

The NRA was approached because members belonging to the association share its underlying mantra: that gun control laws don’t work, criminals don’t obey the law, and the only people affected by gun control are law-abiding citizens, Whitmore said.

I just “love” that a “crime reporter” wrote the story, not a political reporter.  And that the reporter describes as a mantra (mystic incantation) the verifiable fact “gun control laws don’t work, criminals don’t obey the law, and the only people affected by gun control are law-abiding citizens.”

After we are done in Iraq we need to liberate Canada from the bigots like this ‘reporter’.