Former Mountie says gun owners fear future government ...

[R. LaCasse]

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From: "Dennis & Hazel Young"
Subject: Former Mountie says gun owners fear future government ...

... will use long-gun registry records to confiscate privately-owned by
Tim Naumetz

HILL TIMES ONLINE - FRIDAY, NOV. 25, 2011
Former Mountie says gun owners fear future government will use long-gun
registry records to confiscate privately-owned guns By TIM NAUMETZ
In the final round of witness hearings for Bill C-19, women’s groups against
violence squared off with Conservative MPs, gun owners, hunters and the most
prominent university expert who has fought against the registry since its
inception, each side battling with conflicting statistics to make their
case.
http://www.hilltimes.com/news/legislation/2011/11/24/supporters-for-eliminating-long-gun-registry-also-want-an-end-to-gun/28899

PARLIAMENT HILL—A leading member of the 15-year old lobby against the
federal long-gun registry confirmed Thursday what the registry’s supporters
have long claimed—gun owners who want the registry dismantled and all its
records destroyed fear a future government will one day use the information
to confiscate all privately owned rifles and shotguns in Canada. But a
victim of a Dec. 6, 1989, attack by a lone gunman who killed 14 female
engineering students at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, sparking the long
campaign that eventually led to establishment of the federal registry in the
1990s, pleaded with majority Conservative MPs at a hearing of the Commons
Public Safety Committee to maintain the registry, arguing as a woman who has
felt the “pain” of a bullet that it has saved lives and should be kept and
improved as a tool of public and domestic safety.

In the final round of witness hearings for Bill C-19, women’s groups against
violence squared off with Conservative MPs, gun owners, hunters and the most
prominent university expert who has fought against the registry since its
inception, each side battling with conflicting statistics to make their
case. MPs also heard that elimination of the registry is only the first goal
of gun owners who want it eliminated.

Former Mountie Greg Illerbrun, now past president and firearms chair of the
Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, quoted statements from former Liberal
justice minister Allan Rock, now president of the University of Ottawa, as
he laid out what were likely his last parliamentary denunciations of the
registry, with the Conservative majority poised to pass Bill C-19 through
the Commons before the Christmas recess. “This is a good first step,” Mr.
Illerbrun said.

Several witnesses have told the committee in earlier hearings they and other
firearms owners also want an end to gun acquisition and possession licences
that are currently part of the RCMP-administered Canadian Firearms Program.
“The previous government crafted this legislation with the intent to
eventually end private ownership of all firearms,” Mr. Illerbrun told the
committee. “Confiscations have happened and will continue to happen as long
as this legislation (the Firearms Act) remains in its insidious form,” said
Mr. Illerbrun, briefly giving vent to the kind of heated emotion not seen
since several thousand gun owners packed the lawn of Parliament Hill as they
protested the law’s introduction in 1995.

Mr. Illerbrun referred to claims at the time that Mr. Rock once said he
entered politics with the aim of limiting or outlawing private gun
ownership, and told MPs that Criminal Code offences incorporated into the
Firearms Act have in essence turned hunters and farmers into criminals, a
longstanding claim of anti-registry lobby groups. “You don’t put stuff in
the Criminal Code to support an activity, you put it in the Criminal Code to
extinguish an activity,” Mr. Illerbrun told The Hill Times after the
hearing. “The tools are in place (in the Firearms Act) to go, to march
forward and confiscate all firearms, and they are there because it’s in the
Criminal Code.”

Allegations of possible confiscation of firearms have long been part of the
more powerful lobbies against gun-control laws in the United States, led by
the National Rifle Association. Human rights lawyer Paul Champ, in the
debate over Bill C-19, has described them as the “tin-foil hat crowd.”

Despite Mr. Illerbrun’s arguments and claims from Simon Fraser University
criminologist Gary Mauser, who has armed the National Firearms Association
in Canada with years of anti-registry research, that there is no evidence
showing either homicide or suicide deaths have declined because of the gun
registry, Nathalie Provost, wounded in the L’École Polytechnique attack,
urged the Tories to abandon their drive to terminate the registry and
destroy its existing records. “Could you Conservative Members of Parliament
stop pretending that guns are not a crime problem?” she said. “When
prevention works, there are no incidents to document.”

Police officer Duane Rutledge, a sergeant with the K-9 unit at the New
Glasgow Police Service in Nova Scotia, supported termination of the
registry, arguing among other things that its information is unreliable, but
he nonetheless supported Mr. Illerbrun’s position firearms owners fear a
government will one day use the registry to confiscate their hunting rifles
and shotguns, and that many firearms owners do not register their guns, and
hide them from police. “People are hiding their guns, they have an inherent
dislike for government, ‘They’re going to seize your guns,’” Sgt. Rutledge
said, paraphrasing the concern.

PAGE TWO:
http://www.hilltimes.com/news/legislation/2011/11/24/supporters-for-eliminating-long-gun-registry-also-want-an-end-to-gun/28899?page_requested=2

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