Meet the Man Responsible for the Death of Canada’s Gun Registry

This article is from a few months ago, but I thought it well worth posting.  Thank you Garry for all of your tireless work for the citizens of Canada!!!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/02/29/meet-the-man-responsible-for-the-death-of-canadas-gun-registry/

 

Frank Miniter, Contributer
I expose the excesses of the bureaucracy

Looking north across the border, American gun owners may well see the fall of Canada’s long-gun registry with relief. This, after all, lessens the odds that the anti-gun movement will be successful in its attempt to install a gun-owners database in the U.S. However, before American gun owners forget about Canada all over again, there’s an incredible story here not being told outside Ottawa political circles that needs to be heard by every American who cherishes their freedom.

The way the press is telling it, the Conservatives finally gained control of the House of Commons and the Senate and then used, as they said they would, their majorities to begin the repeal of Canada’s long-gun registry. Their first big step, taken on February 15, was the House of Commons vote to kill the long-gun registry. They accomplished this by 159-130. Next up is Canada’s Senate, where repeal is inevitable because Conservatives also have a majority there. Finally, it’ll make its way to the Governor General of Canada where it will receive Royal Assent and be passed into law. So sometime this spring law-abiding Canadians will no longer have to fill out forms and pay fees in order to keep authorities aware of what’s in their gun cabinets.

All that seems to say that the political winds simply shifted and blew over the registry. The problem with that assumption is it isn’t quite true.

The true story is actually much more interesting; in fact, it needs to be heard by every American, as the arguments used by the anti-gun groups in Canada are the same ones being promoted in the U.S.

The story begins on an evening in January in 1994 in a little town called Preeceville, Saskatchewan. Garry Breitkreuz (pronounced Bright-Krites) was then a new member of Canada’s Parliament. He had been elected in October of 1993. Preeceville has about 1,000 residents. Garry was excited. This would be his first town-hall meeting. The topic was about a new gun-control bill, C-68, brought in by the then Liberal Government. It included the creation of a long-gun registry. “I’ll never forget that first meeting,” says Garry. “Even though it was 39 degrees below zero outside the place was packed and the people heated.”

Now it should be noted that Garry was hardly a gun-rights activist. Not yet anyway. Sure, he grew up in a rural Saskatchewan home and had a .30-30-caliber rifle he used to hunt deer with. “But when it came to the gun issue,” says Garry, “I was very naïve.”

Naïve indeed. Garry started the meeting off by saying to the crowd that “this long-gun registry seems to make sense. Maybe it’ll catch a few criminals….” He barely got started in this manner when his constituents made it clear they didn’t agree.

“They challenged me,” says Garry, “to do some research to find out if forcing people to register their guns will really save lives.”

Garry shut up and listened. Before a few more minutes passed he promised to do some research to find out if requiring people to register their guns really reduces crime.

This is where the story behind this repeal takes a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” shift. Garry set out to learn if making citizens register their deer rifles with the police really prevents homicides. “After just a few months of digging into it I did a 180,” says Garry, who soon hired a researcher to help. The researcher’s name is Dennis Young. Together they started asking the government from the inside how much the gun registry was costing and whether it was really reducing crime. The bureaucracy began stonewalling him, so he started filing “Access to Information” requests (the American equivalent of “Freedom of Information Act” requests). By 2002 he’d filed more than 500 such requests.

He learned that the Canadian government was horribly underestimating the costs of the long-gun registry. In 1995 Canada’s Department of Justice told Parliament that the Canadian Firearms Program would cost $119 million to implement and that this cost would be offset by $117 million in fees; however, by 2000 Canada’s Department of Justice was already estimating that the long-gun registry would cost over $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the gun-owners database wasn’t reducing crime rates. In fact, John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, looked into Canada’s long-gun registry recently and couldn’t unearth one murder the registry solved. Lott says, “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case.”

Canada’s Public Safety Minister agrees with Lott. On the day of the vote to repeal the registry the National Post reported that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the long-gun registry “does nothing to help put an end to gun crimes, nor has it saved one Canadian life. It criminalizes hard-working and law-abiding citizens such as farmers and sport shooters, and it has been a billion-dollar boondoggle left to us by the previous Liberal government.”

Now, back in the 1990s Garry wasn’t getting any traction politically or with the press, so he took his research to the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. The government agency agreed to review his data and to do its own audit. The auditing agency agreed with Garry. In 2002 the agency reported: “The Department of Justice Canada did not provide Parliament with sufficient information to allow it to effectively scrutinize the Canadian Firearms Program and ensure accountability. It provided insufficient financial information and explanations for the dramatic increase in the cost of the Program.”

“This report blew the lid off,” says Garry.

He says that before the Office of the Auditor General report made headlines even many Conservative politicians wouldn’t touch the gun-registry issue. They thought it was a losing battle. They said the facts didn’t matter, just the demagoguery they’d surely receive. They were afraid of the big media in population centers in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver—sound familiar?

“But the public was ahead of the politicians on this issue,” says Garry. “In meetings all over the country I was telling people that with what they were spending on the registry we could hire five or six thousand police officers.”

This resonated.

The exploding costs of the registry made headlines even in the city papers. Gary A. Mauser, a Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, has also looked deeply into the costs. He says, “John Lott and I added up the costs and found that, in total, the Canadian government spent about $2.7 billion on this failed experiment.” That’s more than 20 times what it was forecast to cost.

Even after the 2002 report from Office of the Auditor General came out Garry kept traveling around Canada speaking about the costs of having the government invade law-abiding Canadians’ gun cabinets. He also kept citing the crime statistics, which clearly weren’t being affected by this massive invasion of Canadians’ civil liberties. Criminals, as it predictably turned out, weren’t registering firearms they were using for crimes.

Nevertheless, some Conservative politicians still didn’t want to tackle the issue. So Garry looked for a new way to pull them together. In 2006 he learned that the U.S. has a Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus (CSC). Nearly 300 members of the U.S. Congress are members of the CSC. Started in 1988-89, the CSC is supported by the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF), a group that fights for sportsmen’s rights, including wildlife conservation issues and gun rights. (Full disclosure: I do contract work for the CSF.) Garry hopped on a plane bound for Washington, D.C.

According to Phil Morlock, who is the director of environmental affairs for Shimano American Corporation/Shimano Canada and who is a CSF board member, “Garry couldn’t believe the U.S. had this large caucus fighting for hunting, fishing and gun rights. He was even more astounded that the caucus is bi-partisan. He met with CSC congressional leaders. He found himself talking to Republican and Democratic co-chairs of the CSC and asked them how they get along in such a partisan and politically charged atmosphere. The American politicians laughed and said that sometimes they think all they really agree on are sportsmen’s rights, including the rights of law-abiding gun owners.”

Garry flew back to Ottawa and, with the help of Morlock and others, started a nonpartisan caucus called the Canadian Parliamentary Outdoor Caucus. This caucus now is one of the largest on Parliament Hill. “The caucus helped get the information out to Members of Parliament and Senators that the long-gun registry was intrusive and ineffective,” says Garry.

At the time Garry wrote an op-ed for various newspapers in which he said, “[We] need to become proactive in protecting our outdoors heritage from an increasing number of large, well-funded, international groups who want to shut down hunting, fishing, trapping and sport shooting. Rural and urban Canadians of all political affiliations, backgrounds, ages and abilities contribute over $10 billion annually to the national economy through these industries. These traditional activities are a key part of Canada’s culture and an important component of our history as a nation.”

Sportsmen and those who just wanted to protect their families without government interference now had a caucus working for them.

Then, also in 2006, Stephen Harper, a Conservative, became prime minister of Canada by forming a minority government. Harper didn’t have the votes then to tear down the registry, but over the next few elections the Conservatives gained more seats. Finally, in 2011, with the caucus, the government, the facts and the public on their side, the Conservatives had the votes and the will to move against the long-gun registry.

Garry says the caucus, along with the blatant fact that the long-gun registry was costing a fortune without solving crimes, even had support from politicians in other parties. Nevertheless, when the vote came only two New Democrats—John Rafferty and Bruce Hyer—broke from their party and voted to repeal. “They’re now being punished by their party for doing the right thing,” laments Garry.

Then, when the vote came on February 15, something unusual took place. In the Canadian House of Commons members of Parliament stand to signify their votes. After Garry stood to vote to repeal the long-gun registry, they broke into a cheer: “Garry, Garry….” This just isn’t done in the reserved atmosphere of the Canadian Parliament. But repealing a government program—no matter how onerous and costly it turns out to be—is a rare thing. It’s especially rare to see a database of gun-owners repealed. Throughout history many governments have created gun registries—most recently in Australia and England. Gun registries often end in gun confiscations—again, this has occurred in Australia and England—but as far as Lott knows no registry has ever been repealed.

And the moral of the story is that Canada’s experiment didn’t end with the government disarming its citizenry because the people stood up and challenged a statesman to represent them by searching out the truth—this, in a nutshell, is what the Tea Party has been advocating in the U.S.

In fact, I asked Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action how this might affect Americans and he said, “Gun registration in the United States has always been the political fantasy of the gun-ban lobby. The clear lesson from Canada is that registration did not and does not reduce crime; in fact, since Canada’s long-gun-registration law went into effect, the U.S. murder rate has dropped almost twice as fast as Canada’s. A gun registry only infringes on privacy and has led to the confiscation of law-abiding citizens’ firearms in countries around the world, and even here in the U.S. That is why the NRA will fight any registration effort in the U.S. with every fiber we have.”

Indeed, Americans should be thanking Garry, too. He showed how to use facts, tenacity and a democratic process to overturn bad policy by convincing the government to stop making criminals out of law-abiding gun owners.

Gun control in one sentence

A good friend of mine had an epiphany a couple of days ago while pondering the global gun control issue.  He found a way to summarize the entire gun control debate in one sentence:

“If all the AK47s in Libya were licensed and registered, Muammar Gaddafi would still be alive today.”

Do you like it?  I do.  In fact, I like it so much that I’m dedicating an a blog entry to it.  It’s amazing how much meaning can be crammed into a single sentence!!

First point: the AK-47. 

The most quoted and, apparently feared, firearm on the face of the planet.  The Avtomat Kalashnikova selective-fire, gas operated, 7.62 x 39mm rifle was officially adopted for use by the Soviet Army in 1947.  Since then, it has become a favourite for military forces around the world, due to its robust design, reliability, low cost and ease of use.  AK-variant rifles are, in fact, the most widely produced assault rifle in the world [Source: Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles; Killicoat, Phillip; WPS4202; April 2007].

The AK-47 is also incredibly popular among gun control advocates.  Every time a government suggests relaxing gun control laws, the cries of “Assault rifles will be easier to get!!” are heard from coast to coast.  They intentionally invoke images of madmen running loose with AK-47s, shooting anyone who happens across their path.  In the minds of gun control advocates, the AK-47 is the most dangerous gun ever made and nobody should ever own it, or anything like it.  They rely on the average person’s ignorance about firearms to create a state of fear and further their cause.  The bottom line is that a gun is a gun is a gun.  All are inert objects, the only danger comes from the person behind the trigger.  

Second point:  Libya.

The Arab Spring:  a string of revolutions throughout North Africa and the Middle East.  To mention but a few highlights, it began in Tunisia in December 2010, led to the overthrow of the Egyptian government in February 2011, and 9 months of bloody civil war in Libya.  The fighting has calmed in most affected countries, but still rages unchecked in Syria.

The protests, demonstrations and revolutions that rocked the Arab world were widely hailed as positive by the Western World.  They were seen as pro-democracy, the will of people, and the start of a positive new future for citizens of oppressed nations. 

The hypocrisy of it all is that, while groups such as Amnesty International supported these uprisings against oppressive regimes and dictators, they continued to try to disarm the very citizens they were supporting!  Now that the war has ended, the UN has become very vocal about disarming the people of Libya.  They are actively working towards preventing any future generations of Libyans from having the means to fight for their freedom if the need arises again.

Libya is a fitting example for the gun control issue on another front as well.  They have some of the strictest gun control laws in the world.   Civilian gun ownership is entirely prohibited and it is also illegal to privately sell or transfer them.  Despite gun ownership being illegal, civilians own nearly twice as many guns as the military and police.  Civilian firearms are numbered at about 900,000, military firearms at 535,200 and police firearms at 22,000.  The rate of civilian firearms ownership is 15.5 per 100 people.  In comparison, in Canada, the rate of civilian firearms ownership is 23.8 per 100 people [Source:  Small Arms Survey, 2007].

Let me say that again.  In a country where civilian ownership of firearms is completely outlawed, the citizenry still outgun the military and police by almost 2:1!!!  

To summarize, while organizations like Amnesty International fully support the revolutions of the Arab Spring, they are doing everything in their power to ensure that the people revolting are denied the very tools that they need to succeed. 

Third point: Licensing and Registration

Oh boy, where do I even start on this one?  This topic has been done to death so many times, I’m not sure I even want to address it again.  These vary between countries, but here’s the nutshell version for Canada:

Licensing.  This is the process through which a government body determines an individual’s fitness to own firearms.  It essentially states that firearms ownership is illegal unless you are granted an exemption from that law by means of a license.

Registration.  This ties a firearm to its owner by means of a registration certificate.  The certificate contains information regarding the type of firearm (make, model, serial number, etc) and that certificate is linked to a specific firearms license holder.

They seem innocent enough on the surface, but these two puppies have been the cause of much death and destruction throughout history.  Put simply, every major genocide of the twentieth century was preceded by civilian disarmament – Ottoman Turkey, USSR, China, Rwanda, Guatemala, Uganda, Germany.  These confiscation schemes were all aided through systems of licensing and registration.  It’s common sense really – you can’t take a gun away from a person if you don’t first know that they have it. 

In some cases, Hitler and Mao for example, the introduction of the gun control laws was very methodical and a strategic part of their plans.  In other cases, Rwanda and Guatemala, the existing laws were a simple and convenient means to a horrific end.

The bottom line is that the intentions of the people who enact these laws are irrelevant.  What’s important is the potential for abuse and misuse of these laws in the future.  Simply put, if the potential for misuse exists, it’s a bad law.

Putting it all together

Muammar Gaddafi was one of the longest reigning and perhaps one of the most well-known dictators in recent history.  The reason that Muammar Gaddafi is dead is because the people of Libya had the resolve to rebel against him.  The means of their rebellion was their ability to fight for their freedom through the use of privately owned firearms.  The people of Libya were still armed, despite prohibitions on firearms ownership, simply because the country did not have a system of licensing and registration in place that would have allowed for wholesale confiscation.  If Gaddafi had gun controls in place, he would have confiscated firearms prior to viciously crushing the resistance, making many pay the price so that he could remain alive, unchallenged and in power.

Civilian gun ownership is not about hunting or target shooting or even home defense.  It is about freedom and democracy.  Many gun control advocates imagine a world where only the police and the military own guns – a police state.  Others imagine a world of peace where nobody needs guns.  While this is a noble goal, it is not the world we currently live in.  Until the causes of violence are addressed, guns will continue to be a necessary tool in our lives.

Gun Toting Liberals

I was shown this video today and found it to be a very powerful and well thought out argument.  It needs sharing with everyone you know.

There is a misconception all over the western world that guns are a “right-wing” issue.  The topic of gun control has been framed as a left vs right argument, with gun control supporters on the left and gun owners on the right.  This is far from the truth.  The gun debate does not fall strictly within party lines.  History shows that gun control can be introduced from either the left or the right, but that it always has unintended negative consequences. 

Outside the western world, the truth of the gun control argument is obvious. 

Gun Control: The Ultimate Human Rights Violation

I stumbled upon this article today and thought it worthy of being re-broadcast.  Enjoy!

Gun Control: The Ultimate Human Rights Violation
by A.W.R. Hawkins
Posted 06/03/2010 ET

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37303

Lucid students of the political sphere have certainly noticed that liberals are now using the phrase “human rights” even more than they once used their old standby, “civil liberties.” Of course they rarely define human rights, and even when they try, the definition varies depending on the goal of the person that’s using the phrase.

But this doesn’t stop them from having international conferences on human rights, dumping money into organizations like Human Rights Watch, and allowing surviving members of the Woodstock crowd to charge America’s military with violating human rights while simultaneously giving Iran a seat on the U.N.’s Women’s Rights Commission.

Perhaps the two clearest threads in all the human rights jargon are the focus on international law coupled with a potent strain of anti-Americanism. This is a combination that can be deadly when accurately aimed at national sovereignty or individual rights.

The most telling aspect of the left’s obsession with human rights is not so much what its proponents claim to defend but what they would be happy to sacrifice. And one thing all human rights activists are perpetually ready to jettison is the right Americans enjoy in keeping and bearing arms.

Ironically, this right, summarily stated in the 2nd Amendment, should be the lynchpin of any honest pursuit of human rights. Thomas Jefferson made this clear when he equated a government-backed prohibition against defending one’s self with a government-backed denial of “the most basic of nature’s rights.”

When one reads Jefferson’s statement in light of his many writings on nature’s laws and the benefits of private gun ownership, it’s clear he was implying that the denial of the right to self-defense with a firearm is essentially a denial of one of the core aspects of what it means to be human.

In other words, gun control actually steals part of our humanity.

How much worse of a human rights violation can exist than one that actually separates the “human” from the “rights”?

None of this is hard to understand if we just imagine a woman who lives alone, and is being stalked by a dangerous man. She goes to a gun store to buy a handgun with which to protect herself, but because she lives in Chicago, Mayor Daley will not allow her to purchase a gun. Thus she goes home, and hopes the lock on her door will hold.

When he’s ready, the stalker becomes an intruder who breaks the door open, assaults the woman, and then leaves with a smile on his face. After reflecting on the matter he realizes the woman has no means with which to defend herself, so he goes back for more, and in time, as his callousness increases, he goes back more frequently. He knows the woman is helpless to stop him because she has been denied that “most basic of nature’s rights.”

In this scenario, how long would it be before the woman felt less and less like a woman and more and more like a dog? How long would it be before she had a thorough understanding of what Jefferson meant when he coupled gun control with the denial of a core aspect of what it means to human?

America remains a shining city on a hill in this dark world, partly because we still have the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of our lives and property. In light of Jefferson’s writings, I don’t think I go too far in saying that this one freedom goes a long way in keeping our humanity intact.

If you ever doubt the degree to which private gun ownership and the freedom to use those guns for self-defense upholds our humanness, just head on down to El Paso, Tex., where the murder rate is around 23 victims annually. Then lock up your gun in the United States and cross the border into Juarez, Mexico, where the natural right to keep and bear arms has long been suppressed and where the murder rate, at 2,500 to 3,000 annually, is startling.

Once you get to Juarez, it won’t be long till you feel like the woman who sat in her apartment staring at the door, hoping the lock would hold up under pressure because it was the only line of defense she had against her assailant.

Gun control could just be the ultimate human rights violation.

And if we ever give up our guns in this great nation, we will ultimately give up our humanity.

HUMAN EVENTS columnist A.W.R. Hawkins holds a Ph.D. in U.S. Military History from Texas Tech University. He will be a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal during the summer of 2010.

Political Correctness vs Democracy

Today we are urged to pause and ponder the sacrifices of those who have gone before us. It occurred to me that our soldiers fought a war with weapons (of which type it isn’t politically correct to mention by name) to stop a dictatorial regime (whose name isn’t politically correct to mention), who’s leader disarmed the race of people (who we don’t want to offend by mentioning) by registering and licensing their weapons (which we don’t want to mention for fear of offending anyone) prior to confiscation. Once that State held a monopoly on weapons it was easy for it to accomplish its ‘cleansing.’ In fact, the twentieth century saw eight major genocides preceeded by civilian disarmament rid the world of over 150 Million civilian lives.  During the World Wars, we realized that protecting innocent lives from genocide (can we mention that?) was a duty, and our brave citizens stepped up and sacrificed their lives for what we, collectively, believed.

I now wonder in this day of political correctness if there is anything we are willing to fight for. Sixty years later, in a bold denial of history, the United Nations is pushing a global Small Arms Treaty in the name of peace that will disarm civilian populations and leave a monopoly of firepower in the hands of the State – and criminal thugs (or is that redundant?) Sometimes Remembrance Day is a reminder of all we’ve forgotten.

~Keith Linton~

The above letter was written by a friend of mine in honour of Remembrance Day and submitted to several major newspapers across the country.  Unfortunately, it never made it to print.  I’m posting it here not just because it’s an excellent letter, but because it touches on so many points.  As much as I’d like to delve into what I think of the UN and the idea of civilian disarmament, today I’m going to focus on political correctness.  I think this letter is a beautifully satirical representation of what being PC has done to our society.

To put it quite bluntly, I think that political correctness is one of the biggest threats to democracy in our world today.  But, ironically, it’s not politically correct to discuss political correctness.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, allow me to take a step back and define “political correctness”.  It has its roots in Marxism-Leninism and has been in regular use since the 1960s.  However, it didn’t become “fashionable” until the 1990s when its use exploded.  The term “politically correct” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1936, where it is defined as: conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.  

In this age of “emotional enlightenment” when everyone is encouraged to express their feelings, we have become so oversensitive to causing offense to others, that our society has almost ground to a halt.  Nobody is willing to make the difficult decisions anymore because to do so is to guarantee that somebody somewhere will have their feelings hurt.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned with other people’s feelings, but political correctness has gone way too far.  What began as an attempt to minimize social offense against certain minority/underprivileged groups, has evolved into a form of thought control and social engineering.  

Wait a second, did I say “thought control”? Yes, I did.  Political correctness doesn’t just impact the way we speak, it also affects the way we think.  When we are constantly thinking about whether or not we “should” be saying something, it changes how we think in general.  Instead of focussing on the ideas, we become focussed on the language being used to share those ideas.

Also, as much as our PC-trained minds tend to protest the fact, it’s no secret that some special interest groups are more equal than others, and that all special interest groups are more equal than the average citizen.  So, now we’re not just arguing over language, we’re also arguing over whose offended feelings take precedence in the PC battleground that we’ve created.

And while we’re busy arguing about whether or not the language is correct or whose feelings were hurt the most, the ideas get lost in the confusion.  Without the ideas, our society becomes stuck in an endless loop, forever arguing over words and feelings instead of moving forward with a purpose.  Most people are oblivious to this phenomenon, but there are many who are not only aware of it, they have no qualms about using it to their own advantage (this is where the “social engineering” part comes into play)

Vocal special interest groups hoard funding and push agendas in the name of some politically correct theme, playing on people’s fears and emotions.  They do this knowing it will take a brave soul to speak out against their cause.  After all, who would argue for greater privacy in the face of the scourge of child pornography? Who would argue for more freedom in the battle against “terrorism?” Who will push for gun rights even as deadly gang wars are waged on our streets?

It is the favoured tactic of the manipulator to frame her cause in such a way that her detractors, with their often insightful arguments, risk an affront to the PC Gods. It doesn’t matter that those detractors may be right – political correctness has become a weapon.

So what does the letter I quoted above have to do with all of this?  It all comes down to the line, “I now wonder in this day of political correctness if there is anything we are willing to fight for.”

Fear of social censure is no less damaging to a populace than fear of government/police retribution.  We, as a society, have become unwilling to voice our opinions for fear of offending people. We are unwilling to fight for what we believe in because we have been taught that our ideals must always be secondary to the feelings of others.  In that fear, we are no longer able to openly discuss the issues that impact our society.  When we cannot openly discuss an issue, it can never be solved. 

How long can we survive as a society when the important issues are ignored and swept under the rug?  And how can we claim to live in a democracy when the people are unwilling and/or unable to speak their mind?