The End of The Long-Gun Registry?

Bill C-391 is being voted on this evening, for those not following politics that closely it is a piece of legislation that would see the long-gun portion of the gun registry be repealed.

This is a piece of legislation that has trapped the Liberal Party of Canada is a sense. The Liberals originally introduced the gun registry years ago as a means to control and register weapons within Canada as a means to reduce gun violence.

In the process the included hunters within this net of legislation.

The optics of the Liberal Party of Canada is that they are a party that represents the views and mindset of those within the major cities of Canada, and that they are out of touch with those of us who don’t live in a 800 square foot condo near a Subway Station who watch TV on their ipods as they take the Subway to work with Starbucks in hand.

The mistake of the original registry was to require responsible gun owners to go through more paperwork and bureaucracy then the thug on the street that buys a handgun that was brought into this country illegally who doesn’t buy his gun legally in the first place.

It made a handgun basically no different then a rifle.

The problem is that the weapons covered under the long-gun portion of the registry are not really the weapons that are used in conventional street crime.

It seems that people in Toronto are of the impression that stores are being held up by someone using a three and a half foot A-bolt single shot hunting rifle, which couldn’t be further from reality.

Hunting rifles being used in violent crime are so rare and of such statistical irrelevance you will notice that no one in support of keeping the long gun registry is using any sort of numbers in their defense of this registry.

The trouble with this piece of legislation is that is a private members bill, and all parties have opted to make this a free vote.

155 votes in favor of scrapping the registry are needed to move the bill forward, the problem of course is there are only 143 Conservatives in the Commons.

Meaning that 12 opposition MP’s must vote with the Conservatives for it to pass.

The Bloc has made it clear they will not support the legislation.

Which leaves the Liberals and the NDP to allow for the passage or defeat of this legislation.

Four New Democrats and Two Liberals who are from ridings with a lot of Rural votes have apparently stated that they will vote with the Conservatives in order to support the legislation to scrap the registry.

Based on all the data that has been tossed around by both sides I can’t find any significant evidence that the Long-Gun Portion of the registry has done anything to reduce the gun violence that it was originally passed to reduce all those years ago, at least not in any significant way.

Much to my surprise I learnt a while ago that per capita, we as a nation own more guns then our neighbors’ to the south. That figure is of course a little skewed because a large portion of our guns are used for the purposes of hunting.

However the large number of weapons, coupled with the low number of crimes committed using weapons listed under the long-gun portion of the gun registry leads me to believe that our hunters and long gun owners are a very responsible group of weapons owners.

The trouble is that city folks don’t like guns.

It doesn’t matter what sort of gun, they have decided that they just don’t like them

I can’t blame them, living in the city the largest animal I have seen on my property was a Raccoon who took an interest in my uncovered garbage can, and I can hide in my house and call Animal Services.

The problem as I see it lays in the fact that the NDP and Liberals en mass may very well vote to keep bad legislation simply to appease voters who the legislation does not apply to for the most part.

The Liberals are being painted as the out of touch big city intellectuals’ and if they vote against this legislation en mass, they are certainly not helping dispel that depiction.