Shootout At The Yonge Street Corral

I am always amused when people think that crime can be stopped with another law.

Something that I found strangely missing in every single news report I read regarding the shooting of the 4 RCMP officers last month was any discussion at all as to the status of the gun used to shoot them.

Was it registered? If so, how? The police new the guy was unstable, as did half the town. He had a history of violent crime, including sexual assault on a minor.

If it wasn't registered.... well, the police knew he had guns (they were afraid to go near him after all), so why didn't they have the guns confiscated?

Real effectual $2B registry we have...

Still is funny that nobody wanted to talk about it though.

I am sorry; I never did understand this gun registry. Why would someone who is about to use a gun to commit a crime register it. If the government wants to know how many guns are legally in the country, all they have to do is look at the sales figures of licences, weapons, weapons related products. this is information that is not hard to find. MAybe a questionaire? Last I checked most criminals weren't to willing to register thier guns and more than willing to steal new ones to commit thier crimes. If I have my rifle stolen I will report it to the police, they will have serial numbers and id tags for it, if it is never stolen then it never becomes an issue. Because ,yes last I checked, it is still illegal to hunt humans.

"The debate ends abruptly when I remind them that it's already illegal to shoot people."

It's already illegal to break the speed limit, and yet introducing photo radar reduces the number of speed breakers (and, incidentally, the number of accidents). I don't know so much about this gun registry of yours, but I know a bad argument when I see one.

"I am always amused when people think that crime can be stopped with another law."

I am amused at the concept of stopping crime, too. More interesting is: how to reduce it. It's already illegal to rob a store, but 7-11 found that putting a sign up saying "cash registers have less than $50 after dark" reduced robbery in their stores by 80%.

Listen, as I said before, maybe you guys are the experts on this gun registry. But reducing crime isn't just a matter of "making murder illegal" but is also related to changing associated behaviours. I could go on and on with examples of legislation, public-sector policy and private-sector policy in addition to the two above (or, better yet, you can use google a bit an expand your minds). Your arguments need to become a bit more involved before I'm convinced by what you're saying.

NSB:

The gun registry does nothing. It prevents no crime. It ensures no one's safety. Furthermore, any police officer who walks into a situation expecting not to see any firearms based on a clear registry check is insane. I suppose it would come in handy if you wanted to discourage hunting and gun ownership in general, which may be the real goal. Since the registry is an invasive, utterly useless waste of my money, I'd like to see its proponents justify it, rather than its opponents have to critique it. That makes more sense to me. I guess that's the crucial diference that makes me me and you you, though isn't it?

The simple fact is that there is not a shred of objective data that validates the registry as having had any impact whatsoever in reducing firearms related crime. Since it has, and continues to be very expensive, there should be a objective, third party external review of its effectiveness, or lack thereof, and if it is demonstrated to be inffective it should be scrapped. Unfortunately I am cynical enough to beleive that the politicos would almost certainly commission non-objective review that would serve only to validate there own objectives.

We have photo radar for guns now?

Who knew?

Though, in the US, there are jurisdictions removing their red light cameras, due to an increase in accidents at those intersections.

So goes the law of unintended consequences.

Non Sequitur:

Did you even think before you posted? Serriously now... 7-11 putting up a sign saying there is less then $50 cash in the register and a govenment spending $2B for a SIMPLE DATABASE are not even in the same leauge.

Nobody told 7-11 they had to put up a sign. They did it on thier own. Now with our gun control law, what we have done is made it so that farmers, hunters, and gun collectors have to obtain a license to aquire/possess these guns (after spending $100's for training courses), then they have to pay to register each gun.

Whereas 7-11 as a private entity made a descision to post some signs, our government as an authority has told people to register guns. They havn't done anything to stop the breaking of existing laws (most farmers and hunters are not breaking any laws), what they have done is to create a whole new law to be broken.

Now, as to your photo radar analogy. Again, I quite frankly can't figure out what you are trying to get at. Photo radar is an enforcement tool, not a whole new law to be obeyed. The gun registry was kinda sold as an enforcement tool in that police would be able to know if you might have guns in your house before they come busting down your door. Unfortunately the system is so ineffective, slow, and cumbersome that they can't wait for the DB search to be performed (the bad guys would be long gone). This doesn't matter anyways, since chances are, if they're breaking down your door, you are doing something illegal, and probably havn't registered your guns anyways.

Now, you might say, if people break the registry law then they might get arrested and put in jail before they can commit crimes. That could be a valid point, except that the attorney generals in several provices (including Ontario, the most populated province) have gone on record to say violations of the gun registry law won't be prosecuted, because the registration proccess was so full of errors and inefficencies that ordinary, law-abiding, criminal record free, mentally fit people couldn't get thier guns registered anyways.

I am not against the concept of gun registration or control. I am against spending $2B on something that was only supposed to cost a few million.

The reason so many people are against the gun registry is because it was sold as a means of "getting guns off the street". Why is this significant? Because the guns used in street crimes are handguns, whch have been restricted for decades by various older laws. So a gun-control law was already in place and was being broken on a regular basis. But in a knee-jerk urban-vote-grabbing decision, our government decided to waste billions.

The only people this law has really affected are the joe farmers and hunters.

The govenment could have saved lives by spending $1B on hiring more doctors and nurses, and another $1B to better secure our border with the US (so that Americans couldn't sneak so many handguns into our country).

One final point. Regarding your comments re: using google to expand our minds. Perhaps you could use to do some research yourself?

My 2c.

-- Steve

"The debate ends abruptly when I remind them that it's already illegal to shoot people."

heh heh,

In Winnipeg we had a record number of murders last year and a record number shot & killed too.

Canadas 3 most prolific murderers were all from other countries, Air india, Marc Lepine and Picton.

The obvious solution is to stop immigration. How would gun control have saved Air India?

Bring back capitol punishment. I'd pay for Pictons rope. And the wood to build a gallows too.

Non Sequitur:

I believe that it is not the $50 sign in the 7-11 stores that reduces armed robberies in their franchises, but rather the fact that $50 is the actual till limit amount imposed by the store through its POS system and represents the actual maximum gain from such an illegal act. So potential felons have to weigh the risk-reward equation (if they can manage the math). No doubt, some of the bone-heads would go for it anyway. I am sometimes surprised at what some people will do for so little money - as a good friend says, our Liberal friends here would render their mothers to tallow for a dollar.

So what we have here is the Liberals p*ssing away $2B on a simple database project all the while using false premises to sell it to the gullible Canadian public.

Furthermore, I think it a bit silly of you to introduce speed limits into a discussion about an incident that took place in the Canadian equivalent of Times Square in which innocent pedestrians were wounded by gunfire. Ironically, given the locale, the odds are good that the wounded innocents are Liberal Party supporters.

The registry is a stupid idea: an indecently wasteful expenditure that I suspect points back along the same trails in Montreal that Adscam has taken us down, but for a lot more money. This is not a joke - people out shopping on a fine spring afternoon were shot. Yet our ever-caring Liberals would have us believe that their insidious gun registry is protecting us. Either the Liberal instigators of the registry lied when they were selling it to us, or did actually believe in its effectiveness. That is either rancidly evil, or preposterously stupid to the point of being unworthy of the public trust. LPC is a scourge, and I point to this registry debacle as evidence thereof.

The solution was NEVER to make it difficult to obtain weapons, if it isn't a gun it will be a knife, if not a knife then a pointed stick or a rock, or even poison.

The ONLY solution is to make the penalty for murder so extreme that nobody will want to commit a murder.

We used to have this, it was called Capital Punishment. By removing this deterrent we have opened to doors for murder and have no right to wonder why it is on the increase.

Regarding CodeTech's comments on capital punishment.

The homicide rate in Canada as a whole has decreased from a high of around 3 homicides/100 000 people between 1971 - 1976 (the year Canada abolished the death penalty) to around 1.7 /100 000 people in 2003, its lowest level since 1960s.

Further, shootings as a percentage of homicides have also decreased from around 45% in 1961 to around 25% in 2002. The last time that the number of shooting related homicides was above 40% of all homicides, 1976.

I am not suggesting a causal realtionship between abolition of capital punishment and the drop in Canada's homicide rate, but it is an interesting coincidence. It does show however that there is no direct causal realtionship between the death penalty and homicide deterrance, at least in Canada.

All the other comments about the gun registry being a massive boondoggle? Well yeah. $2b is a lot of money to spend on an as yet unproven database.

My response to the anti-gun movement:
I've Got a Rifle
http://www.sasktelwebsite.net/hermg/Ive%20got%20a%20rifle.htm

Could the dearth of news have something to do with PC & multiculturalism?

The 'Gun Registry Program' was never about protecting Canadians- adscam firms in Quebec got some of it, some of it was to provide jobs/votes for otherwise unemployables in the Maritimes, and receipts for the rest, disappeared.
T-shirt seen in Nova Scotia: Piss off a Liberal- buy a gun. Haw!