Letter: Legitimate questions about gun registry

Letter: Legitimate questions about gun registry
Date: Mar 22, 2005 8:38 AM
PUBLICATION: The Leader-Post (Regina)
DATE: 2005.03.22
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Letters
PAGE: B8
BYLINE: Reg Russell
SOURCE: The Leader-Post

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Legitimate questions about gun registry

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I was in very goods spirits while driving to work on a recent morning until the
CBC news came on, which I normally look forward to.

Of course, the top news story was to do with the funerals for the slain RCMP officers.
Alberta Premier Ralph Klein was the feature interviewee. He had kind words for the
officers, their families, friends and co-workers, but he also touched on the ineffectiveness
of our billion-plus gun registry and said that "perhaps" it was time to
revisit the law with a view to canceling it.

The message was discreet and articulated in good taste, he wasn't ranting and he
was certainly being respectful for those who are in the early days of a long and
painful grieving process. His interview was followed by a most disturbing response
from a Liberal MP, who lashed out at the premier for being so insensitive, adding
that for him to even suggest that the registry was the issue was completely ignorant.
Well, this upsets me, to put it mildly. If the registry is not the issue, then what
is?

The registry we bought into, whether agreeable to us or not, was to serve as a final
system of checks and balances to ensure that random, senseless acts of violence
involving guns would be nixed long before the "event" could ever take
place. I think by now that most realistically minded Canadians are quite convinced
that the concept and the unmanageable database on duck and deer hunters that it
spawned isn't very effective in any capacity, let alone the highly touted function
we were promised. This is because the very people that this database is supposed
to monitor, track and protect us from, didn't buy into the program.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would a deranged individual who hates cops, government
and, in general, most everyone in the world, not comply? I can't figure this out,
but I guess that's why this duck and deer hunter did comply, because I, like the
majority of Canadians, follow the rules even when I don't agree.

So, getting back to "my" issue -- the MP who stated publicly that the
registry is "not the issue", His remark was not only insensitive towards
a community struggling to cope and desperate for answers, it's blatantly arrogant.
And is, metaphorically speaking, just another slap to our faces by a federal government
that is bound and determined to stand by legislation it created, no matter how costly
and ineffective, just to save face.

Many members of the police community and like-minded Canadians have been passionately
suggesting, ever since the day Allan Rock proposed this legislation, that this money
could be better spent making our established institutions that have been in the
business of upholding the law for centuries, better, rather than squandering it
on a government make-work-project that has turned into a wasteful, money- devouring
bureaucracy.

I'm not suggesting that $1-billion plus spent on policing, over the same period
is the panacea, but I wonder. Would this situation have been handled more competently
if the officers had better training, been supplied with better intelligence, had
more experience with these situations and, more importantly, been backed by an agency
that is adequately resourced? I think it might have and take exception to those
that have the gall to publicly announce that there is no linkage between the wasteful
gun registry and the tragic event that took place in rural Alberta.

Reg Russell
Craven