More delays and people ignoring this waste of time and money–but this time there’s talk of the police ignoring it:

In what has become a familiar refrain, the Canada Firearms Centre has once again quietly put off several gun regulations that were supposed to take effect this month.

Among the measures delayed until next year is a provision to have police forces across Canada register all their weapons – including seized guns – with the federal agency. New rules governing gun shows have been deferred until November 2006, while regulations that would force gun-makers to identify all firearms with internationally recognized markings won’t come into force until the end of 2007.

The provisions were initially supposed to take effect last January, but were put off to Sept. 1. Now they’ve been deferred again.

A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan said the deferral is both to “ensure compliance and be responsive to the feedback” on the regulations from the public.

…

The latest delays indicate there are still many kinks in the system, said Conservative MP Peter MacKay.

“It’s another example of the ineffective, overly bureaucratic nightmare that is the gun registry,” MacKay said from Halifax.

“The government continues with this simultaneous face-saving, rear-end-covering exercise of trying to justify a very cumbersome, useless system.”

MacKay, a former Crown prosecutor, insisted the government backed off because police forces would have ignored the registration demand.

“They’ve got far more important things to do.”

The registry has become an easy target. The Liberals promised it would cost taxpayers just $2 million when they introduced it in 1995. But the price has skyrocketed past $1 billion and been the subject of scathing criticism from the federal auditor general.

Opponents claim tens of thousands of guns remain unregistered, and say the system punishes law-abiding farmers and sport hunters while doing nothing to deter illegal weapons from getting into the hands of criminals.

It’s a losing issue.  They should salvage the computers, lay off all the Canada Firearms Centre workers, and either spend the money saved on police and/or prisons or let the people use it to buy a good handgun and training to defend themselves and their families with.  Registration of firearms and their owners is no more effective in reducing crime and no less abhorrent than registering Jews/blacks/homosexuals/etc.

From The Globe and Mail in Toronto:

Ontario to blitz gun shops

In an effort to stem a recent rash of gun violence in Toronto, the Ontario government announced it will begin conducting sweeps of gun shops to help reduce the number of illegal guns in the city.

“[We want] to ensure that we have safe standards in place,” said the province’s Attorney-General Michael Bryant at a press conference in Toronto Thursday.

However, Mr. Bryant said the sweep will be limited to businesses and not individual homes, as that is the purview of the federal government and the gun registry.

They are doing sweeps of the gun shops to reduce the number of illegal guns?  How about they “blitz” automobile dealerships to reduce the number of illegal cars on the roads?  Or tweaking one of my favorites, conduct raids on cosmetic stores to “stem the recent rash of prostitution” on the streets?

Give it up guys, you spent $2 Billion dollars on a failed gun registration system, and still you can’t answer just this one question in the affirmative.  Harassing the gun store owners isn’t going to be productive either.

Wendy Cukier, President Coalition for Gun Control, and moonbat extraordinaire sent out a news release yesterday:

… international standards for marking and tracing, for import and export and for the regulation of firearms is essential to preventing the diversion of legal guns to illegal markets and the efforts over the last 8 years at the United Nations to combat the illegal trade have been important.

By all means, shouldn’t we combat illegal trade and stop legal guns from getting into illegal markets?  It’s just common sense, right?  Why are so many people opposed to common sense gun laws?  The only people opposed must be red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthals and criminals.  How could it be any other way?

That depends.  What’s your definition of an “illegal market”?  The store in the state prison?  Okay, I won’t argue that one today.  But what about those people prohibited from weapon ownership by the Weapons Control Act of 1938?  That law, passed in March of 1938, made it illegal for certain “undesirable” people to own weapons.  The state would provide for their protection, if they needed it.  In November of that same year there was a “spontaneous” riots against those same “undesirables” who had been disarmed.  It was called Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.”  The riot lasted for two days as the fire and police brigades stood by.  The morning after the riot was over 30,000 arrests were made.  The arrests were of the “undesirables” who were the targets of the riot and not the rioters.  The government was implementing it’s first attempt at a solution to “the problem of the Jews”.  By the fall of 1941 they were implementing the Final Solution to the Jewish question.  Any weapons delivered to Jewish people and other “undesirables” was a crime by that German law of 1938.  What about the shipments of arms into that market?  Would Cukier have supported that law?

One of the argument the moonbats make is that arming people just prolongs the conflict and makes a return to peace more difficult.  I’m sure that is true.  The 10 million dead from the Final Solution are very peaceful now.  That conflict (the extermination of millions) would have taken much longer had the victims been able to defend themselves better.  Wouldn’t that have been terrible?

There were no 20th centery genocides without there first being a gun control law to remove the weapons from the target of the genocide.  Estimates vary but somewhere between 60 and 200 million civilians (men, women, and children, not just soldiers!) were murdered in the 20th century by government sponsored programs of extermination–all of them were victims of gun control.  How many millions will there be in the 21st century if we don’t learn the lesson from the 20th century?

What Cukier (Kooker?  How appropriate is that?) apparently doesn’t realize is that ownership of weapons is a right even more essential than freedom of speech or any other natural right.  Without the means to enforce your rights the others mean nothing.  The government can infringe upon them at will with virtually no recourse.  You cannot have a secure free state without the right to keep and bear arms.  This entire concept has been expressed succinctly as, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”  This right shall not be infringed!  So, as Lyle in the comments section of this post, says, “… there’s one legitimate gun law in America. It makes it illegal to write gun laws.”  I think Lyle, while correct, is a bit narrow in his scope.  I would expand that to international scope.  Laws restricting personal weapons in any country are as revolting and without moral authority as laws authorizing slavery or genocide–which is what those weapons laws enable.