Mark Holland, the RCMP, and "Penultimate Reports"

Long-gun registry advocates have yet to produce one

Ajax-Pickering MP -- and Ottawa's resident village idiot -- Mark Holland recently pretended to be rather vindicated with the RCMP produced a report claiming that the long-gun registry was efficient and cost-effective.

Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Hoeppner is far less than convinced.

"My position remains steadfast as does our party's position," she said. "We believe the long-gun registry needs to end. As legislators, that's our job, to look at policy, to decide what's in the best interests of Canadians and make those decisions. So, nothing has changed."

Hoeppner went on to explain that stronger pre-licensing screening protocols are needed in order to actually keep guns out of the hands of people likely to use them to do harm.

In the bizarre world of Mark Holland, a preference for actual, real gun control rather than cosmetic legislation is "ideological".

"The Conservatives have wanted to scrap this for ideology," Holand declared. "Facts will not move them."

"They don't care about facts," he continued. "You could present the penultimate report, and they would ignore it."

The problem for Holland is that neither he nor any of the other proponents of the long-gun registry have produced anything even remotely resembling a "penultimate report". The recent report released by the RCMP doesn't even come close.

The RCMP has different motivations for wanting to declare the long-gun registry to be successful. After all, the gun registry is currently administered by the RCMP itself.

Currently, the RCMP is a troubled institution. Questions regarding the conduct of its officers abound. The institution continues to face questions about irregularities in its pension fund.

The RCMP is an institution desperately in need of some good news. An internal audit of a program they themselves administer is the perfect opportunity to produce precisely that.

Holland must certainly understand the folly of citing this report as if it were the final word on the long-gun registry. (The detail that it was the Conservative party who placed the registry under RCMP administration after the bureaucrats the Liberal Party hired to administer the program ran it deep into the depths of wastefulness is really just the icing on the cake.)

Even Holland's favourite talking point -- the support for the program by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police -- has absorbed a black eye recently, as it was revealed that the organization accepted a donation of $115,000 from the CGI group of companies.

The CGI group produces the software for the gun registry.

That makes for a massive conflict of interest, and raises questions of whether or not any conditions were placed on the donation.

Moreover, if there ever were a penultimate report on the long-gun registry, it absolutely would not support maintaining it.

“It is difficult to understand why the chiefs of police support the long-gun registry,” Simon Fraser University Criminologist Dr Gary Mauser once remarked. “[It] has so many errors that relying upon it puts the lives of rank-and-file police members at risk. This is a classic database problem: garbage in, gospel out. The police should know better."

"Millions of entries are incorrect or missing," he continued. “Most striking, less than half of all long guns in Canada are in the registry."

"The long-gun registry does worse – it misdirects the police," he said. "People who have registered their firearms are less likely to be violent than Canadians who don’t even own firearms. They should be. Gun owners have been screened by the police since 1979."

"We are told that 15 percent of the guns used in homicides are long guns," he briefly conceded. "What is not said is that virtually none were registered. How does the gun registry help? When I spoke at the Ontario Police College, one of the instructors told me privately that trusting the registry was a way to get good police officers killed."

Those are some very sobering facts -- they should be doubly so for proponents of the long-gun registry.

Where did Dr Mauser make these remarks?

Before the Public Safety Committee, of which Mark Holland is not only a member, but Vice-Chair.

Was he simply absent the day that Dr Mauser gave these remarks? Or did he disregard them because they weren't ideologically soothing enough for his tastes?

It seems that the answer is almost certainly the latter. Holland doesn't care about the facts, and he doesn't seem afraid to lie about them.

This is not a terribly new act for Holland, or for any other proponents of the long-gun registry. When they aren't attempting to justify the long-gun registry by waging a campaign of ideological emotional blackmail (centred around the L'Ecole Polytechnique shootings), they're deceiving Canadians by using pictures of assault rifles in media stories promoting their agenda.

(Under Canadian law, assault rifles aren't long guns, they're restricted or prohibited weapons -- different category, one that will remain unaffected by Hoeppner's bill.)

Reality is not kind to Mark Holland, nor to the long-gun registry. When real life finally releases its "penultimate report" on the long-gun registry, it will almost certainly favour its abolition.

Michael Ignatieff With (Fertilized) Egg on His Face

  
Liberal Party scandal mongering falls short

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper called upon the G8 to undertake a maternal and child health initiative, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff seemed to think he had been handed a golden opportunity.

By calling on Harper to ensure that the maternal and child health initiative included funding for abortion, Ignatieff must have imagined he could paint Harper as a right-wing extremist and pander to the pro-abortion movement by re-opening the abortion debate.

That move has left Ignatieff with egg on his face, as his party narrowly lost a non-binding motion to ensure that abortion and contraception were included in the plan.

Read that again: Ignatieff couldn't even pass a non-binding motion on the topic.

A number of anti-abortion Liberal MPs declined to show up for the vote, and three Liberal MPs -- Paul Szabo, John McKay and Dan McTeague -- voted against the motion.

"We've been very clear from the outset that this package, this program, would not include abortion," Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner said recently. "That's not what we want to talk about. It's not the direction that we want to go."

Unfortunately, Ignatieff very much did want to go in that direction, and fell short in his blatant attempt to pander to the pro-abortion movement -- a great many pro-abortion activists must be asking some rather serious questions about the Liberal Party's commitment to their starkly ideological agenda today.

Hopefully, Michael Ignatieff will think twice before he so obnoxiously attempts to exploit the perpetual controversy of abortion again.

Typical Zerb, Typical Sleaze

Antonia Zerbisias concocts imaginary world in which gun registry saved OPP officer

With the tragedy that befell Ontario Provincial Police Constable Vu Pham still fresh in the minds of Canadians, it should be considered unsurprising that Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias intends to take full advantage.

Zerbisias, as many should recall, has a significant obsession with the long gun registry. Her numerous columns on the topic are a continual re-hash of poorly-conceived and largely-undefended arguments in favour of the long gun registry that, although they are tailor-made to be ideologically soothing to supporters of the registry, don't hold much basis in logic.

Among the various instances of anti-Conservative grandstanding, however, Zerbisias offers this particular nugget:

"Candice Hoeppner, the Manitoba Conservative MP who last May introduced the bill to kill the registry, would write, in an opinion piece published by the London Free Press, 'The long-gun registry is a massive Liberal policy failure and it needs to end. It makes no sense to force law-abiding individuals with firearms licences to register their long-guns. It makes no sense to believe the registry will prevent a gun crime from taking place.'

Well, that's true. It certainly didn't save Constable Vu Pham, who died just northwest of London."

It's remarkable that Zerbisias would spare such candor in her writing -- it certainly doesn't happen very often.

But if one wonders precisely why Zerbsias would insist that the gun registry must be maintained even if it doesn't prevent crime, one may lose their mind at the logical inconsistency of Zerbisias' next remark:

"But it may have saved Barbara Preston, the wife of the accused killer, Fred Preston, 70, who died last night.

Numerous news reports and sources indicate that Fred Preston, despondent over the separation last year from his childhood sweetheart, had headed out to find her.

What happened on that lonely back road on Monday is still unclear. What is known is, Pham, on his way to that 'domestic' call, was shot when he attempted to stop a white pick-up truck. A gun fight broke out, killing Pham and, eventually, Preston."

Zerbisias then goes on to insist that gun control is a matter of gender politics -- which is a canard of magnificent proportions.

First off, gun control is not an issue of gender politics. Secondly, the long gun registry is not actually a tool of gun control.

But even beyond that, Zerbisias' "logic" resembles nothing of the sort. If the long gun registry failed to prevent Fred Preston from driving out to confront his wife with a gun, and failed to prevent the death of Constable Pham, then one may wonder how Zerbisias expects anyone to believe that it would have prevented the death of Barbara Preston.

No. It was the intervention of Constable Vu Pham that saved the life of Barbara Preston.

Antonia Zerbisias oddly doesn't seem to care about that particular detail. Rather, all she seems to be interested in is using Pham's death for some anti-conservative grand standing.

It makes one wonders precisely what standard of editorial scrutiny Zerbisias' work is subjected to at the Star. When this kind of lunacy can so easily be published in the Lifestyles section of that paper, it makes one suspect that the answer is "not much".

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.