Canadians are getting mixed messages from their Prime Minister. His message last week to a gathering of rural municipal leaders in Saskatchewan was that there was a certain level of safety in having a gun in the home “when you are a ways from immediate police assistance.” Other than it sounding like a straight lift from American National Rifle Association handouts, the Hair was in conflict with Canadian law.
Canadian law requires that a gun be stored unloaded and both gun and ammunition be kept locked up in separate locations. You have no chance to put things together if the home is invaded. If you are smart, you let the thieves help themselves and let the police and insurance companies look after the fall-out.
When anti-gun lobbies responded about the foolishness of the Prime Minister’s statement, he dismissed them as accusing him of vigilantism. The problem is that it is urban gangs that use guns and other killers in Canada seem to prefer kitchen knives.
And invoking the image of rural home invasions is about as silly as you can get. Home invasions in rural areas are something from a writer’s imagination and do not even make it into Canadian crime statistics.
And the Hair also needs to remember that Canadians are not in tune with his out-of-date stand on guns and gun ownership. This is the Prime Minister who removed the long gun registry that was needed and used by our police.
It makes very little sense that the Hair is going in the wrong direction with guns. It is almost as though he was on a quest to open up the ownership of guns in Canada.
Most recently his government had an opportunity to take better control of gun shows in Canada. What his government did instead was to throw out what regulations there were.
At a time when the United States is trying to stop the killing of children with guns, Canada’s Conservative government is busily opening the doors to more freedom for our gun enthusiasts.
Back in the 1990s when the Hair was just good-ole boy Steve Harper, Reform MP from Calgary, he actually voted against his own party and for the Liberal Party’s creation of the long gun registry. Times do change in politics.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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