For some reason this quote came to mind when I read the article:
Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
It’s politicians that infest the whole habitable earth, even Canada, but some of them ‘get it’–even in Canada:
For the past decade, the previous Liberal government has put all of its eggs in one basket when it comes to preventing gun crime. It invested over $1 billion into a gun registry that never functioned properly and was never proven to have prevented a single crime.
While federal gun registry officials were out chasing down farmers for not registering their .22s, relatively little was being done to attack criminal gun use. The Montreal tragedy, sadly, was the ultimate proof of the gun registry’s failure. The preliminary police investigation revealed Kimveer Gill appears to have properly registered all his guns and complied with every other firearm regulation.
The $1 billion wasted on the registry could have been put to much better use in putting more police on the streets, providing better equipment for forensics labs and helping schools and social workers to identify and deal with troubled youths before they become violent.
The Liberal opposition, blind as always to facts, continues to chant that we must keep the registry to prevent future crimes, even though it has failed so abysmally to prevent past ones. The new Conservative government will not repeat the Liberals’ mistakes.
…
Shamefully, the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc continue to exploit the grief of families by trying to twist the Montreal tragedy to their own political advantage. The Conservative government is not interested in such rhetoric. We are interested only in doing the right things by taking practical steps to clamp down on gun crime and violent criminals.
Tom Lukiwski
Lukiwski is Conservative MP for Regina Lumsden Lake Centre.
Ottawa
They have a long way to go to undo all the harm done by the restrictions on firearms. An entire nation needs to be educated on self-defense and how to use handguns. Had that $1 Billion (some say $2 Billion) been spent on teaching people to use and carry a handgun the Montreal tragedy would have been stopped much sooner. Think of it this way; when some criminal starts shooting innocent people what is the current response? It’s to call the police who, quite correctly, arrive as fast as is practical with their own guns to stop the shooter.
Got that? Good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns from hurting innocent people. Everyone knows that. When the good guys don’t have guns they are easily slaughtered by the bad guys with guns.
Therefore the way to reduce the number of innocent people from getting hurt or killed is to make sure there are good guys with guns close by. Therefore we need more good guys to carry guns with them and reduce the time from when a bad guy does something bad until he is stopped by a good guy with a gun. In this country we, by constitutional design, have the ultimate solution–The Right to Keep and Bear Arms. This solution also protects us from when the police, and the government in general, becomes infested with bad guys.
Unfortunately because of the infestation of politicians we have suffered with for the past 70+ years (I’m thinking of NFA ’34, but really it’s been longer than that) we have a lot of work to do before we restore things to their proper order. At least we are headed in the proper direction on this important issue.
