Antonia Zerbisias: Gun Nutty

Zerbisias has her facts -- and logic -- twisted in regards to gun registry

There's something special about guns in the hearts of Ontarian left-wingers.

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant famously made waves with his "No Gun, No Funeral" campaign -- which, if one were to argue the matter under the guise of specious hilarity, may have implied that people don't die of natural causes -- in support of a ban on handguns.

When the federal Conservative party declined to jump on board with Bryant's campaign, noting that legal ownership of handguns was already restricted to target shooters, collectors and those who need them for the purpose of their employment, Bryant lashed out rather predictably.

"The Conservatives have long been in the holster of the gun lobby," Bryant fumed. "I say `no gun, no funeral.'"

And he did -- very often.

Despite the fact that the No Gun, No Funeral campaign was operated out of Bryant's campaign office (something his staff had the temerity to deny when contacted), Bryant mustered likewise temerity in insisting that the campaign wasn't part of his reelection bid.

Moreoever than this, however, the No Gun No Funeral campaign was based largely on a very dubious version of the facts regarding handguns, handgun use, and guns in general.

In today's Toronto Star, Antonia Zerbisias took her own turn at offering up specious argumentation in favour of the Liberal party model of gun control.

"The one thing I will never understand about the Conservatives is how they say they can be so down on crime – and yet so up with guns. Some guns, anyway," Zerbisias writes in her op-ed column. "Guns such as that used to murder those four Mounties in Mayerthorpe, Alberta in 2005."

Zerbisias goes on to complain that the Conservative party has moved once again to scrap the federal long gun registry, which would exempt rifles and shotguns from the registry.

Full stop.

God knows that one will never stop Zerbisias from trying to portray the Conservative party as hicks and rednecks, riding in from the cowboy west to force their nefarious gun culture on the rest of the country. But one would think she could at least be a little more honest about the details.

Zerbisias tells Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner to tell the murdered mounties' families that "the long-gun registry unfairly targets our hard-working farmers, hunters and sport shooters, but not criminals."

The problem for Zerbisias is that the Mounties murdered outside of Mayerthorpe by James Roszko weren't murdered using a hunting rifle or a shotgun.

Roszko killed Constables Brock Myrol, Peter Schiemann, Leo Johnston and Anthony Gordon with an HK .308 semi-automatic assault rifle -- the kind of weapon that is already restricted under federal firearms legislation, and will remain restricted even after the long gun registry is repealed.

But if one thought that Zerbisias was being rather liberal about the facts, one just has to wait to see what she does with her logic, when she writes that "fact is, according to Canada's Coalition for Gun Control, one out of three women killed by their husbands is shot, 88 per cent of them by legally owned rifles and shotguns."

Zerbisias declines to note that registering those weapons in no way prevented the murder, lending skepticism to her next claim:

"Fact is, according to Statistics Canada, firearm spousal homicide is down drastically since the gun registry was enforced," seeing as how we've already seen that registration of firearms doesn't prevent them from being used to murder, there is absolutely no justification for parading this particular correlation as proof positive that the gun registry itself has reduced such crimes. The reduction is much more likely due to other forms of gun control introduced since the introduction of the registry, including enforcement tactics.

Antonia Zerbisias may be surprised to find out that many small-c and capital-c conservatives alike support gun control. But, unlike Ontario's power elite and would-be power elite, conservatives prefer methods of gun control that actually protect Canadians, as opposed to metely being a nuisance to law-abiding gun owners.

But don't ask Zerbisias about that. She's still too busy pretending that the Mayerthorpe Four were murdered with a hunting rifle.