If it weren’t for the obvious and justified distress these people are in I would just roll my eyes at their insanity:

SOUTH PORTLAND, Me. – Kelly DeCambra made her way through a seven-inches-an-hour snowstorm to a dingy Maine State Police garage where, among the brake parts, transmissions and a flat-bed tow truck, she hoped to find a fragment of solace.

It would come in the form of a Ruger .44 Magnum Super Blackhawk revolver, caked with blood and the memory of Ms. DeCambra’s son, 21-year-old Lionel St. Hilaire, who was shot to death with it last year.

The mother had come to watch the gun that was used to kill her son be sawed into pieces in an acrid plume of white-hot sparks.

Ms. DeCambra’s act of witness was made possible by a law Maine enacted in 2001 that requires handguns used in homicides to be destroyed when they are no longer needed for evidence. Before that, guns were often sold or auctioned by police departments to raise money for other equipment.

…

Maine’s law came about because of Debbie O’Brien, a Kennebunk woman whose 20-year-old son, Devin, was shot to death in 1996. When she learned that the state police would probably sell the gun used to kill her son, Ms. O’Brien said her reaction was, “Oh, my God, the police are here to help you and the next thing you know they’re turning around and selling a gun, making money off my dead son.”

Ms. O’Brien lobbied for the proposed law, saying that she told the state police, “Look, if you need money, let’s do bake sales.”

“You’re in hell,” she said. “You’re just struggling to have a life, and then I realized that would include the gun.”

William Harwood, a gun control advocate in Maine, and Robert M. Schwartz, executive director of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association, said the original proposal was for all crime guns to be destroyed. But because of the state’s strong hunting lobby, they said, the final law included only handguns used in homicides.

“To be candid,” Mr. Harwood said, “the legislation had as much symbolic importance as it does deterrence.”

But the symbolism is powerful, said Ms. O’Brien, who watched the .22-caliber handgun used to kill her son be cut up six years after his death.

“It was just a very important day for my husband and I,” she said. “This was a weapon that changed our lives.”

Yes, their thinking is distorted by the grief they are experiencing but to think that a gun would go to Hell because it was used in a homicide (note, not necessarily a murder) assumes not only that there is a hell, but the gun has a soul, and it was the active agent in the homicide.  You don’t hear about people wanting cars, baseball bats, and kitchen knives used in homicides being destroyed where one would assume there is a similar amount of grief.  I think I see why this is important to them.  As Harwood, above says, this is about symbolism.  It’s about the demonization of firearms.  It’s about attributing motives and evil to a piece of metal as does O’Brien when she says, “This is a weapon that changed our lives.”  These people need grief counseling not laws that take money away from the police.

From CBC News on the Canadian gun registry program:

1995
Bill C-68, the strictest gun control legislation in Canadian history, receives Senate approval. It calls for harsher penalties for crimes involving the use of guns, creates the Firearms Act and also requires gun owners to be licensed and registered. At the time, the government says the registry would cost about $119 million, but the revenue generated by registration fees would mean taxpayers would only be on the hook for $2 million.

…

Feb. 13, 2004
Documents obtained by Zone Libre of CBC’s French news service suggest that the gun registry has cost $2 billion so far.

May 20, 2004
The Liberal government, just days before an expected election call, eliminates fees for registering and transferring firearms. Ottawa will also limit its spending on the gun registry to $25 million a year, spending which has averaged $33 million a year and reached as high as $48 million. Licensing of gun owners and firearms will continue.

June 2005
In the 2004 Report of the Commissioner of Firearms on the
administration of the Firearms Act, the Canada Firearms Centre estimates that the cost of running the registry for the year ending Dec. 31, 2004 was less than $100 million. The report says costs are continuing their downward trend and should fall to approximately $85 million beginning in fiscal 2005-2006.

You don’t need an accounting or psychology degree to figure out these anti-gun people have mental problems. Estimated to cost $2 million and it then comes in at 1000 times more at $2 BILLION. The Liberal government says spending on the gun registry has never been more than $48 million per year. This is AFTER it has been revealed in the previous nine years they have spent $2 billion–meaning that on the average they have spent over $222 million per year.

With that $2 billion they could have funded 1000 more cops or better yet it could have purchased guns and training for 2 million at risk people–such as the 14 women who were killed in Montreal in 1989 when they didn’t have gun to defend themselves with and woman hating Muslim extremist Gamil Gharbi started shooting them.  It was that incident that initiated the push for the gun registry.  Instead of taking the appropriate, time proven, path of providing a means for people to defend themselves they let their bigotry and mental disorders cloud their thinking.  At last report the gun registry, at a cost of $2 billion, has only been credited with solving one crime.  So what do the Liberals conclude is the correct answer?  Why of course!  It’s more gun control.  There is no need to have them answer Just One Question.  All you need is a body temperature I.Q. to come to the correct conclusion on these mental defects called Liberals.

Jenny Price in the Washington Post is critical of anti-freedom lobbying groups for “thinking small“:

…what troubles me most is that the gun control lobby is pouring its
resources into battles that probably won’t save many lives — and we’re
losing even those.

…

The real problem is not that handguns aren’t safe or well-regulated
enough, or that you can’t sue and try to bankrupt a corrupt
manufacturer after someone you love has been killed. The problem is
that 65 million people in the United States own handguns.

…

And if the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which leads the gun
control crusade, continues to assure us that it won’t try to outlaw
handguns?

…

Wouldn’t it make more sense to define the ultimate battle as one for a
national ban on handguns — the sole gun-control measure that promises
to save tens of thousands of lives? With an endgame that can actually
achieve the ultimate goal, perhaps we’d acquire the logical and moral
authority to win more of the smaller battles.

First off, I am extremely sorry for the tragic loss of her
brother to a someone using a gun.  But it wasn’t a gun that killed him,
it was someone using a gun.  That someone could have used a car, fire,
or a kitchen knife to do the same evil.  It’s the user, not the tool,
that is evil.

Going on to the more important points it is she, Ms. Price, that is
guilty of “thinking small.”  She has an extremely poor source of
information when she claims:

Of the 12,000 guns used to kill people every year, 160 are used in legitimate self-defense.

Ignoring that she confuses the number of guns used to kill people with
the number of people killed with guns (the same gun is often used to
kill several people) I suspect she got her number from the number of
initial charges of murder that were later dropped, or perhaps mixed up
the number of self-defenses in some small geographical area or short
time period and compared that to the number of people killed in the
entire nation during a year.  In any case even the most casual of researchers
can find far more than 160 cases of legitimate self-defense in a year. 
The real number, according to numerous studies, is somewhere between
one and three million per year–most of which don’t result in a shot
being fired and never make it into the news.

Hence, her error of “thinking small” has to do with her use of a very
small number for legitimate self-defense uses of firearms.  Many
of the other numbers she uses are distorted or misleading as well.

Add to that Just One Question
which puts to rest the false promise of banning weapons to improve
public safety and I think Ms. Price should have sufficient material to
expand her thinking on the issue before she writes another opinion
piece.