Kadhim to Harper: Let's Get it On, Bitch

Kadhim wants to go mano-a-mano with PM over Gun Registry

Once again, the gauntlet has been thrown in Canada’s gun control debate.
Figuratively and literally.

Hayder Kadhim, one of the victims wounded by Kimveer Gill’s rampage at Dawson College, has challenged the Prime Minster to a public debate on gun control.

“I want him to explain why he wants to dismantle a gun registry proven to have saved many lives and which now costs next to nothing to maintain,” Kadhim announced at a press conference in Montreal.

Of course, an expert on the gun registry like Kadhim may be able to explain to us how the gun registry prevented Kimveer Gill from opening fire in Dawson college with his Berretta Cx4 Storm, a legally-owned and registered – albeit registered – firearm.
Except, it didn’t. Whoops.

Kadhim may also want to defend his assertion that the Gun Registry is proven to have saved lives. It hasn’t. The Dawson College shooting is proof of that.

In fact, the Gun Registry relates to incidents such as the Dawson College Shooting in one of two ways: either, A.)The weapons used were registered, and the Gun Registry did nothing to prevent it; or B.)The weapons used were unregistered and the Gun Registry couldn’t have possibly done anything to prevent it.

Kadhim also may have wanted to check the facts regarding the cost of the Gun Registry before his press conference.

Originally budgeted at $2 million, the cost of the gun registry have exceeded $1 billion, good for a cost inflation of at least 5000%.

Whoops.

Gun Control advocates have accused the Registry’s opponents of sabotaging it. “There’s no question that the same people who said ‘take it apart because it costs too much’ did everything in their power to drive up the costs and make it impossible to implement,” Wendy Cukier said in 2003, while serving as the president of the Coalition for Gun Control.

To make matters worse, Kadhim seems to have forgotten all about the revelation of May 16, 2006, when it when it was discovered that a bureaucrat loyal to the Liberal party covered up $39 million in costs in 2002-03. . It was discovered that the money was later reported over the two subsequent years.

In other words, the costs were covered up. Then the cover up was covered up.
To top it all off, one might expect that a gun control expert like Kadhim would know that the gun registry doesn’t accomplish anything that can’t be accomplished by tracking gun licenses. In fact, tracking gun licenses would e even more effective in predicting the presence of a weapon in a given situation, because it allows for cases when a license has been issued, but no weapon has been registered, yet may still be present.

Furthermore, Kadhim has yet to explain how criminals will be persuaded to register their weapons, or how the gun registry acts to prevent crime with weapons that aren’t legally owned.


If Kadhim wants a debate opponent on the gun registry, he can find one – right here at the Nexus. If Kadhim wants to have a public debate on the gun registry, I will respond by making a challenge of my own: you set up the venue, you buy the plane ticket, and I will personally show up and give him a public debate on the gun registry.

But he had better be prepared to take a severe ass-whupping, because he is seriously barking up the wrong tree. His campaign to save the Gun Registry is both ill-concieved and ill-informed.

His advocacy in favor of a monolithic bureaucracy that is built upon nothing more than an illusion of action is proof enough of that.