"...the heretical lesson behind the latest RCMP shooting: jail doesn't work."

Must agree, Kate. Jail works fine. Its letting them out that doesn't work.

But you have to let them out, because sentences have limits for a very important reason. Limitless sentences are a tool of tyranny.

Some people will behave after you show them the stick. Some won't. The ones that won't are the reason cops have guns and jails have bars on them.

And - this is the reason why we need a death penalty. I've heard the bleeding hearts, I've heard the yammering leftist morons - I have even heard supposedly intellectual conservatives bloviate against the death penalty. Save it.

We need to change the laws and put broken people like these down. This POS WILL kill again if he is able.

13 breaches of court orders? The second should have been proof that he was an unrepentant career criminal and thus deserved a long prison sentence. Yes it costs a lot to incarcerate someone but how much does it cost to leave them out in terms of property loss and injuries to the law-abiding?

Surely there is room in northern Alberta for a nice big penitentiary?

jails work if the criminals are on the inside looking out

Jail works. Rehabilitation doesn't.

Saw the article in today’s Calgary Herald.

After reading the headline, “Shooting proves jail does not work”, had to give up.

Is this some kind of convoluted logic?

The bad guy was not in jail. Would this happen if he was?

The bad guy had over 97 reasons to be in jail and he was not.

Sometimes you have to give up and say to the masturbators to write to their mothers and apologise for talking stupid.

The bad guy had over 97 reasons to be in jail and he was not.

And that happened consistently during the last 15 years of his life.

Christie is good at prose but sucks at math.

I think I have the perfect solution to this problem. Everybody on the parole board (and judges and lawyers in this case) should be mandated to have an extra room in their home ... with spouse and children living there ... to let those (Rehn - for example) who they think he/she is ready to be re-introduced into society have them live with them for a MONTH.

As it is now, I wonder how they (parole board members and Judges and their lawyers) can sleep at night when somebody they just let out commit crimes. Rehn should have been classified as a dangerous offender.

If jail doesn't work, we're doing it wrong. Most instances of people complaining of a thing not working turn out to have user error as the root cause.

I had the same reaction to that article. I was trying to understand if it was an attempt at satire, and no matter how I read it I concluded it was not.
someone with 59 convictions in 15 years should be serving life without parole.

The criminal killed himself, I suspect the crime rate will be lower now in his absence.

Glenfilthie said, "And - this is the reason why we need a death penalty."

And Liberal pols sucking up to the Muslims +Muslim immigration to Canada is the reason the death penalty is a bad idea. Do you trust the government that much? Do you think this somewhat stable state of affairs in which we now live is going to exist forever? Is there any power that the government has gotten that has not been abused by the government?

TheTooner said, "Rehabilitation can work, and it does in a minority of cases."

Most career criminals are sociopaths/psychopaths. They cannot be rehabilitated because they have an incurable mental condition.
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Do to multiple firearms violations, Shawn Rehn had been prohibited from owning one until the year 2020. Where did he get a gun? I have skimmed a number of articles on this sad scenario and none of them tell us what sort of firearm Rehn used. Does anybody here know?

Sorry. The cops are busy on Jasper Ave picking up jaywalkers. This is and was a massive failure on both the system and the Royal Canuckistan Maryjane pickers.

Prison is all cruel and meaningless until one of the real important people are affected.

You know what did put an end to his criminal life? A bullet. Should have been applied years earlier when it was quite obvious he intended to be a predator in society rather than a member.

By Christie's perverse logic, insulin doesn't work to treat diabetes since it only works as long as you're actually taking it; anti-retrovirals don't work to treat HIV since it recurs as soon as you stop taking them and safe injection sites certainly don't work since the users continue to use. Heck, breathing doesn't even work since despite breathing over a hundred times after waking up one still has to breathe again!
Jails work just fine as long as the criminals are kept inside them. What doesn't always work is rehabilitation. In the same way that we can control diabetes but cannot cure it, there are certain criminals within our society whom we simply cannot rehabilitate. We need a mechanism (three strikes?) to identify them and take them out of the general circulation. Once they're over seventy and the hormones have settled down some of them could be considered for release case by case. Otherwise, since the prison life-style obviously isn't a major disincentive for them, neither is it a major adversity for them. They can be happy in prison, and the law-abiding can be happy with them in prison: win-win.

So where were the armed bystanders in the parking lot that may have helped the police?

Yes of course, they were unarmed by law and cowering inside protective barriers.

That's too bad, I suppose we'll never know if an armed good citizen may have saved the life of this policeman.

Of course long jail sentences work...just ask Robert Latimer, he'll never ease anyones pain ever again

CTV~"Investigators said Rehn brought a handgun into the casino prior to the shooting"

And yes it should be obvious to any reasonable person that gun laws and prohibitions don't protect anybody from the bad guys.

Somewhat related:

Canadian National Firearm Association – Petition

Your chance to be heard in parliament by March 28 2015

https://nfa.ca/news/magazine-capacity-petition

https://nfa.ca/news/ar15-petition

Help keep Canadian communities safe by promoting responsible gun ownership for law abiding citizens.

The fact that Rehn was caught 97 times tells me that he was a very slow learner and would never have benefitted from "rehabilitation". Smart crooks don't get caught and don't get into rehab. In Rehn's case, punishment didn't work either since he seemed to have used jail as a second home. The early releases and failure to lock him away for the duration after parole violations is a cause for concern and warrants scrutiny of the justice system.

There has to be a better way then the death penalty> I could never stomach giving the state the right to kill it's sheep. I don't trust the police nor the justice system period. It's full of individuals who would kill their own mammas for power and a vote. Here in Ontario we had an ME who made stuff up to fit what he wanted. Dr. Randal Smith. He was proven to be "faulty" in his assesment of hundreds of cases. Family was persecuted for stabbing their child repeatedly when in fact the child died from a pit bull attack as per the parents story.

Jail is good criminal school. What does work is forced restitution...right down to a life for a life.

“The fact that Rehn was caught 97 times tells me that he was a very slow learner...”

He was 34 years old, with 59 convictions and 38 outstanding charges.
Someone's a slow learner, but considering he was footloose and fancy free with a record like that, it probably wasn't Rehn.
He may have been caught 97 times, but those 97 catches are likely a mere fraction of the offences committed considering crime was a lifestyle.

Don Morris said, "were for the most part, of low normal IQ, many FAS and FAE types."

I will bow to your superior knowledge and direct expertise here.
As far as I know, there is no cure for FAS or FAE or low IQ. Therefor in those cases, as well as in the case of psychopaths, rehabilitation cannot possibly work as their condition is 'baked-in-the-cake'.

Sounds like the same story as what'shisphuck in Mayerthorpe.

"The "better way" would mean lifetime incarceration,and we queasy Canadians can't stomach that."

Nor should we. First, it's the murderers that go there. Then it's the rapists. Then it's the thiefs. Then it's the guy who sold wheat illegally to Americans. Then it's the guy who went fishing without a license. Then it's the guy who wrote a pamphlet that offended a protected class. Then it's the guy who votes the wrong way. Then it's you. If we ever come to a day in North American where people are jailed for their political beliefs, you can bet there will be studies and experts telling us there is no other way.

It never ceases to amaze how 'c'onservatives - who oppose the expansion and strengthening of governmental/bureaucratic power in almost every other context - simply lose their minds when it comes to law and order stuff and want to give the government (who they distrust in every other way imaginable) the power to kill or incarcerate people for life. As though the status quo will never change, LEOs are somehow the "good" kind of petty functionaries, and the powerful are always benevolent.

I recall a fellow telling me that back in the old days; before our society got enlightened about crime and punishment, a criminal got the 'paddle' coming into and out of jail. It was a device that rotated and applied a scourging of sorts to the criminal. It usually worked wonders in ensuring most criminals dared not come back for another round. But then what did those barbarian Canadians know? We are much progressed nowadays. We only apply the beating to the innocent.

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"The fact that Rehn was caught 97 times tells me that he was a very slow learner..."

how so? like most canadian criminals rehn learned that even after being arrested a hundred times, the ineffectual legal sytem will still house, feed, pay for your university degree and even buy you new genitals (if that is your particular kink).

you bide your time, suck up the bennies and hit the weight pile... and return to straight society stronger and more self-involved than when you went in.

he learned that he was an apex predator and people couldn't really do sh!t about it.

somebody tell me... why are we warehousing paul bernardo and russell williams. if we're lucky, maybe they'll piss somebody off and get shanked... before the lunatic left releases them back into the largely defenseless herd.

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"The "better way" would mean lifetime incarceration,and we queasy Canadians can't stomach that."
To that slaw said, "Nor should we."

Incarceration for life is not a slippery slope, as you have portrayed it. People can always be released if the political pendulum swings that way or if they have been found innocent of the crime for which they were sentenced.

IF, as you suggest, people will later be getting life sentences as we slide down your slope for rape>thievery>black marketing>illicit summery offences>pamphleteering>wrong voting, then we are waaay past worrying about incarceration for life and it's time to worry about us residing in mass graves.

By the way, congratulations for conflating violent offenders with non-violent offenders and a strawman into a single flaccid argument.

The choice, however, is between not fixing the current status quo of releasing unreconstructed incurable violent career criminals into our midst and actually protecting the public from them in a realistic manner.

You have not offered a solution. I welcome you to do so.

The issue if jail "works" is a red herring.

No shootings would have happened if he had been in jail. Jail doesn't have to "work". It just needs to prevent assholes murdering cops.

Knight99 and Oz, I said Rehn was a slow learner because he was stupid enough to keep getting caught 96 times after the first time, ie.,failed to learn from experience.

I heard the suggestion that he may have been part of a gang planning to rob the casino and that, after shooting the cops, he became a liability. It would be nice to think that his "friends" did him in.

Hey, administrator - why did my reply to Knight99 and Oz disappear into "review"? No nasty words in there that I could see. I merely observed that someone who gets caught 96 times after the first time was not "learning from experience".

[A certain word used by a lot of spammers - it starts with "c" and ends in "o" - caught the filter. As always, the filter is triggered automatically, so it's never personal. -- EBD]

@Doug - There is no solution to the problem. There will always be an assortment of criminals, lunatics, and ne'er-do-wells running around hurting people and causing trouble. It was ever thus. Just ask Abel.

@Oz - A lot in your post to digest (e.g. it is gracious of you to allow that innocent people would be released) but I'll leave it at this: you have a lot more faith in politicians and LEOs than I do. The violent crime rate (and crime rate in general) has been in general decline for decades. I have no inclination to give the third rate minds at the Crown, the RCMP, or local and provincial police departments any additional powers to fight a problem that is decreasing in severity every year....

Canada's greatest enemy...the courts.

"Had the second constable been armed maybe things would "

He is NOT a constable if he is not armed. They went after a stolen car, and figured the guy wasn't guilty?? So you go up to a thief and let him shoot you in the head? Darwin's law.