Requiem for the Long-Gun Registry

If you've followed my little blog over the years you know how I feel about the long-gun registry. So you can imagine how I feel tonight.

Stephen Harper has begun the process of shuttering Canada’s long-gun registry, tabling a bill to scrap a database on firearms owners that for rank-and-file Conservatives stood as a powerful symbol of everything that’s wrong with big government.

Determined to drive a stake through the heart of the registry, which cost more than $2-billion to establish, the Tories are going so far as to destroy the data.

And I'm SURE you know how I feel about Candy Hoeppner...

“They’re upstanding citizens who work hard. They take their kids and grandkids out hunting and shooting and those kids, by the way, probably aren’t involved in gangs in the streets,” she said.

“These are good salt-of-the-earth people and for so long they have had really nobody in government who has been able to make any changes on their behalf.

As if they're upstanding citizens and those who live in cities i.e. most Canadians, are criminals. As if we should feel sorry for those too cheap, too dumb, or too paranoid to fill out a form. And register a gun like they register so many other things.

As if it was all about criminals instead of helping to protect the lives of police officers and paramedics. As if it was all about farmers and hunters instead of mental illness.

Or domestic abuse:

Or protecting the lives of women.

As if the Cons aren't the real criminals for endangering the lives of so many Canadians.

As if their decision to destroy the data wasn't an outrage against democracy.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said today that all the records of the gun registry are being destroyed for one reason -- to thwart future, more gun-registry-friendly governments.

And Stephen Harper wasn't a crazed authoritarian.

From last week, in the House of Commons:

(Stephen Harper) Mr. Speaker, the law of our constitutional system is extremely clear. A previous government cannot bind a future government to its policy.

Or a lying maniac who would do ANYTHING to change Canada beyond recognition.

But of course what bothers me the most is the way those misogynistic Cons are defiling the memory of the murdered women of the École Polytechnique...

And all those who worked so hard in their name to make Canada less of a gun-friendly society. A gentler, safer place.

How soon people forget the horror of gun violence...



But I won't forget. I vow tonight that however long it takes, however hard the struggle, that I will work to unite progressives, defeat the Cons, bring back the registry, and take back my country from those rabid teabaggers who would turn it into Amerika.

Oh boy. Tomorrow I'll be angry. Tonight I'm thinking of those poor murdered young women, and all those who loved them.

And I'm just so sorry...