Stephen Taylor has a little good news;

I’ve just learned that the government will be tabling legislation in the Senate to scrap the long-gun registry. Current legislation is already on the order paper in the House of Commons, introduced by Conservative MP Gerry Breitkreuz as a private members bill (C-301) whereas the legislation in the Senate is a government bill.
Private members bills usually have a tougher time reaching the stage of Royal Assent and thus government legislation will be given a higher priority and indicates that the government is interested in moving to eliminate the long-gun registry as soon as possible.

Update – many of our commentors aren’t so convinced. Nor is the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.

“Bill S-5, only removes the requirement to retain registration certificates. It does not shut down the gun registry,” said Tony Bernardo, Executive Director of the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action. “By including a statutory requirement to report all transactions of non-restricted firearms to the Chief Firearms Officer, and by having to receive approval for that transfer, the Bill proposes to morph the registry to a paperless system.” He added, “As the Chief Firearms Officer is a police official in most jurisdictions, the collected information regarding the buyer, seller and the firearm, will simply be retained as ‘police files.’ A registry by any other name…”
As the Chief Firearms Officer is provincial in jurisdiction, a system of sharing transfer information from CFO to CFO must be in place to facilitate inter-provincial transfers. The maintenance of thirteen interconnected registries, combined with the time required to transfer many thousands of firearms per day, will increase the cost of operation of the long gun registry tenfold over the current system.
“Bill S-5 may rid the Conservatives of their Gun Registry commitment but Quebec will maintain it’s beloved registry and Canadian taxpayers will once again be required to fund another giant white elephant disguised as public safety,” stated an unnamed source in the government of Canada.
“Bill S-5 is bad legislation, pure and simple, no matter what branch of government introduces it. It is simply a re-hash of the failed Bill C-24 that died on the Order Paper because of its lack of quality. Any Canadian who cares about where their money is being spent would do well to ignore this legislative disaster and support Bill C-301,” added Bernardo.

More – Brian Lilley has a different take – “the long gun registry is already dead.”

7 Democrats.

At Legal Insurrection;

News is just breaking that Attorney General Eric Holder is withdrawing the indictment of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens based on severe prosecutorial misconduct. The Politico reports, via NPR, that Holder will instruct deputies to withdraw the indictment against the Alaska Republican today, effectively voiding the conviction that cost Stevens his job:
[…]
This is what happens with politically motivated prosecutions. While Stevens may or may not have committed a crime, he was deprived of a fair trial by prosecutors who knowingly and in defiance of court orders withheld relevant documents and information in order to secure a conviction of a
high-profile Senator. The result was not just a wrongful conviction, but a change in the overall structure of our political process which will have implications for decades if Begich becomes the deciding vote on Obama’s agenda.

More at NPR.