Canada: Guns: Account scandal re Gun Registry exposed, Toronto Mayor wants to keep boondoggle going
.
Today I learned that Canada has two classy civil servants - both of them women. I'd been watching the representation of Canada in Haiti by our Governor General, Michaëlle Jean (recently appointed by the now-fallen Liberal govt of Paul Martin; I realized just today that her return to her land of birth on a state visit was a very good thing. Especially so, since Canada has been trying to be of help for some years in that desperately poor, politically tumultuous, and terribly violent society. It seems there are too many guns around, to many machetes, too many gangs and paramilitaries.
Today was the occasion of a second woman civil-servant making headlines in Canada; and, in her understated style, the Federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser made her yearly report, again lowering the boom on the ousted Liberals - this time for their regime of false reporting on financial records of their once-vaunted Gun Registery (which has proved to be a classical boondoggle) sold to the public as the solution to violent crime. (She also exposed the tremendous lag in providing housing on Native Reserves; and the recruitment problem of the Canadian Forces, a problem rather of retention presented on the eve of a Parliamentary vote to extend the CF mandate in Afghanistan, or pull the plug. But more on these important matters another day.) The AG pulled no punches regarding all threeproblems.
Instantly, we have had word that the new Conserative govt will be fulfilling another of that party's campaign promises - to cutback the financially ever-hemorrhaging agency. It will be placed under the purview of the RCMP, which I think is a good move. At the same time, it will not be expanded; there will be an amnesty for handgun owners who did not register, a group who constitute a lively phalanx of activists and whose demographic is said to be largely rural. People who want to register their privately-owned weapons, including firearms like rifles and shotguns, will still be able to do so. This feature meets an interest of the gun-owners, who may be possessors of more than one weapon or may be collectors. Registration means that if the weapons are stolen, there's greater likelihood of these being recovered.
The demand for registration of all weapons, which seems to be dead until such a time as when the Liberals get re-elected, is made by urban police forces. One can understand this interest. However, the blatant manoeuvering of urban politicians, like Metro Toronto's Mayor David Miller, ostensibly in support of our urban police - actually is a quite different interest; and, I believe, far less transparent. There's no doubt that Miller's gun-reggie partisans have a long history of being anti-police; but now that he's in office and the number-one city issue is urban terrorism and youth-gang shootings, Miller if he and his are to have any political future must sidle up to the police, adopting their interest. This is what is happening in Miller's attack on the Conservatives for solving the Liberal Gun Registry financial scandal in the manner the Conservs have today indicated.
But Miller and the local Liberal/NDP coalition have done nothing else of note to remove the gangs and stop the shootups. They've blamed everyone else for the problem, rapping the robes of august somnolescence ever more titely around their fat rear-ends. There's a vacuum at city hall on real mobilization against the gangsters who terrorize their peers, while all ages of persons become more and more afraid to use the city sidewalks at nite. So, Miller in blasting the Conservative move against the farcical Gun Registry and in sidling up to the police on this one limited issue, actually is diverting attention from the city's inaction and claiming it's own powerlessness.
I don't know if banning handguns, for instance, is really in the interest of urban dwellers, as His Worship the Mayor stoutly maintains. But in a chauffered steel-plated limo, peering out at the sidewalks he rarely walks day or nite, and then only for photo ops, he has a completely different relation to the tide of violence to which we non-worships must be alert in Toronto. Surely, his dwelling is more secure than mine, where I've had to face on two separate occasions intruders, and experienced them as life-threatening. Were I armed with a handgun ....
Miller's stance means we can't defend ourselves against the thugs, who are bigger and faster than we are, especially if we're less steady on our feet and less agile and more elderly, or in a wheel chair.
But let's say the tilt of wisdom is with the police and the Mayor in regard to large cities with gangsters and a shoot'em-up culture. Then I say: Let's allow cities to have plebiscites to vote to ban all guns in their territorial jurisdications (apeal to Conservative localism for the Federal enabling legislation). Let's shutdown radio stations and TV channels broadcasting programs that promote, even glorify killer music, videos, and gangster movies. Let's have massive anti-violence advertizing on all the media, and jam the media that comes in from elswhere teaching the violent way of life. Let's throw gangsters in jail for a long time.
In other words, let the rural areas handle guns in their own way, while upon democratic confirmation let's ban guns in Toronto while not pretending gun-bans or gun-registeries are going to change the situation of rampant urban violence much at all. Mayor Miller is not aiming at the cultural roots of the issue, because he's afraid to get honest about it. - Politicarp
Sidebar Poll:
Keep, axe, cutback, or 2-prong Gun Registry? Scroll down the Page 1 Sidebar to the red poll box and vote!
More sources:
Greater Toronto Area Bloggers post (short version of above)
Auditor General's Report - 3 main issues
On street gangs and guns - Mackenzie Institute (Jan 2006)
Tories won't kill registry immediately
No comments:
Post a Comment