As usual, whenever the Advocate prints an anti-gun article in their editorial pages, I feel compelled to respond.
This time your columnist has taken issue with our prime minister being advised on firearms matters by individuals who represent the recreational firearms community.
These individuals, who head up various shooting organizations, are well educated, well informed, and articulate on matters pertaining to firearms control and its effect on the law-abiding firearms community.
They have also given reasoned, well-researched presentations in opposition to the United Nations, which is presently attempting to eliminate civilian ownership of firearms, apparently to make it easier for Third World thugs and dictators to terrorize their populations, particularly in Africa.
These individuals advising our prime minister are the same ones who warned the previous Liberal government that the long gun registry would be unworkable, useless and prohibitively expensive while doing nothing to deter crime.
In this they were proven correct.
Perhaps your columnist would be happier to see them replaced by the same left-wing social engineers whose rudimentary knowledge of firearms matters resulted in the $2-billion waste of the failed long gun registry.
Your writer seemed aghast that this group of advisors recommended that prohibited firearms outlawed by the previous Liberal administration be reinstated to legal status.
This is simply a property rights issue that would never have survived a Charter of Rights challenge had these rights been enshrined originally.
It appears that some left-wing committee of bureaucrats thumbed through a gun catalogue and decided to ban whatever looked scary to them.
Predictably, they forgot to include the actual firearm used in the Ecole Polytechnique shooting.
For good measure, they also decided to ban any handgun with a barrel length of less than 101 mm.
This effectively outlawed half of the registered handguns in the country.
They were rendered worthless with no compensation offered by the government for what were legal purchases with after-tax dollars.
There was no logic to this decision and the advisory committee simply wants an injustice reversed.
Any hesitation on the part of Stephen Harper to accept these recommendations probably lies in the realm of practical politics.
Quebec is obsessive-compulsive when it comes to gun control and wants access to the registry records to set up their own system.
It is not a coincidence that the province with the toughest anti-gun stance has also been the site of the only mass-murder shootings by deranged individuals in the country.
Prior to the Dawson College shooting, I predicted in a letter to this newspaper that an event like this was inevitable.
Tragically, my prediction was correct.
In simple terms, it boils down to more gun control equals more crime.
When it comes to both gun control and separation, it appears that Quebec embodies the definition of insanity, that being the repeating of the same mistakes over and over while expecting different results.
Personally, I am more than comfortable with the members of the firearms advisory committee as it ensures that the government is listening to actual experts in these matters and not a bunch of left-wing social engineers with absolutely no understanding of the issues.
Terrence Rawlyck
Lacombe