PumaTAC1 
Posted on 10/14/2007 1:26:03 PM PDT by Clive
While the fur flies in Quebec over religious minorities and "reasonable accommodation," the National Assembly is quietly holding hearings into Anastasia's Law, the Charest government's legislative response to the 2006 Dawson College shootings in Montreal. The bill is nicknamed for Anastasia De Sousa, the sole person on the campus whom the inept creep Kimveer Gill was able to kill other than himself.
The proposed law is scarcely earth-shaking: Like other governments in Canada, Quebec's is now finding that there are few obvious gun-control measures left available to them, short of banning anything that goes "bang." Jean Charest's bill will outlaw guns at schools and daycares, which are not exactly bristling with artillery now, as far as we know. This measure is unlikely to impress anyone unless they imagine that a Kimveer Gill or Marc Lepine sits in his basement thinking, "I'd love to go out and shoot a bunch of people in a suicidal rampage, but that would be illegal."
The bill also restricts the ownership of semi-automatic weapons to gun-club members, imposes a requirement on club owners and managers to report suspicious or troubled behaviour by members, and, in a praiseworthy move probably inspired by the April Virginia Tech rampage, creates exemptions from privacy laws that will permit doctors and teachers to warn police of possible threats to the public from their patients or students. (A governor's panel investigating the Tech killings found that poorly written privacy legislation, interpreted too broadly by four or five different species of officials, bureaucrats and professionals, played a large role in obscuring obvious signs of danger from the killer, Cho-Seung Hui.) Nearly all privacy laws contain language declaring the primacy of the public interest, and putting more teeth in that language is likely to help restore a healthy balance to such legislation.
There's at least one other thing for Quebecers to be grateful for in Anastasia's Law: So far, it does not include the provisions demanded on Wednesday by an outraged Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, chairman of the Murdered or Missing Persons' Families Association (MMPFA). Mr. Boisvenu, whose daughter was murdered in 2002, attended a hearing to attack the bill as too lax.
"Could this law have prevented the Dawson College shooting? My answer is no," he said. There must have been at least a little embarrassed foot-shuffling in the room, because he is obviously right about that. But then, in an odd display of non-sequiturship, he went on to state that the law should be amended to ban certain kinds of knives. "I invite you to go to a flea market over the weekend. You will be astonished to see that anyone can buy big knives, Rambo-style knives," he declared. "And it's mostly young people age 14, 15 or 16 who buy those knives. I can't believe that people can buy that here."
We can't speak for the attendees, but those under the age of 40 or so must have been flooded with sudden nostalgia at the reference to Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), the Sly Stallone hit that launched a thousand-strong genre of movies about lone, shirtless, apparently bulletproof veterans taking on entire armies of commie foreigners in steamy, vegetation-heavy settings. The flick did indeed drive male teenagers crazy with lust for the hollow-handled survival knife that Sly used to kill baddies, cut brush and cauterize his own wounds. If cheap versions are really still available at the flea markets, it's a remarkable testament to the movie's influence. (And cheap versions of that knife are pretty much the only kinds that exist; no one actually interested in wilderness survival -- or mass killing, for that matter -- brings a blade with largely useless saw-teeth and a hollow handle full of crap into the woods with him.)
Do large but legal fixed-blade knives with flashy movie-inspired features have very much to do with preventing murder, let alone mass murder? Not really. You can kill someone just as readily with an ordinary Bowie knife, a machete, a hatchet or the big knife your mom uses to cut up food. Unless Quebec is going to outlaw camping, hunting and dicing chicken breasts for supper, it is hard to see what practical steps can really be taken to address Mr. Boisvenu's concerns. And it must be said -- with all due respect to the great tragedy his family has suffered -- that he is pushing the respect granted to the families of murder victims to its limits. As such genuine but misplaced displays of emotion become the norm, other crime victims will find it increasingly hard to find a sympathetic audience.
On the other hand, with politicians running out of attractive anti-gun ideas after the expensive disaster of the national firearms registry, but perennially wanting to appear tough on violence, some kind of arbitrary legislative action against features of certain knives must surely start to look more and more attractive. When the registry was announced in 1995, a lot of gun owners made glum jokes about knife control being next on the agenda. How long, one wonders, will they remain jokes?
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PumaTAC1
This writer is pretty frigging clueless.
Knives with saw teeth are fairly handy in the wilderness. Additionally, knives with saw teeth and small folding saws are one of the more requested items that our troops in the sandbox are interested in.
Keep yer hands off my Kukris.
Next it will be forks. Only spoons will be allowed in the Nanny State.
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It ain't the meat, it's the motion. Six or seven inches is enough. |
This simple and obvious logic is too profound for the knee-jerk gun banners.
***Do large but legal fixed-blade knives with flashy movie-inspired features... ***
My Camillus NY 1-1967 issue knife had saw teeth way before Rambo was ever thought of. It’s been on many a hunting trip.
But for serious use I would rather use my Sheffield Commando knife from WWII. No fancy movie inspired features on it.
I carried a Randall 14 about 15 of my 20 years in EOD Teams.......
http://www.jbrucevoyles.com/Auction%2023/DCP_1035.JPG
That one line shows the idiocy of all gun laws. If a criminal, or an insane mass murderer for that matter, is willing to risk breaking the law against murder that carries the death penalty, why would he or she be afraid to break a gun law that carries a maximum 10 year sentence and is usually the first charge that is plea bargained away by the prosecutor?
All restrictive gun laws are not only totally worthless at stopping crime, they're much worse than that. They are a deadly threat to the safety and security of every law abiding person who is denied the God-given RKBA by those worthless laws. The gun-grabbers use the fear of guns in criminal hands to justify denying law abiding people the protection they could have from those criminals by making it impossible for them to be both armed and law abiding at the same time.
And only plastic spoons at that, like the kind you have to eat with during an airport layover these days.
What about pointed sticks?
Or bananas.
I understand that it is already unlawful to carry a knife without lawful purpose in most western countries, including the US.
Difficult to see how people could possibly comply with a knife registry: the registry would be jam-packed with Boy Scouts and chefs, whereas I doubt the average knife-toting Scroat would remember that he must register his switchblade OR ELSE.
Real knife-fighters — the deadly ones — do not carry Rambo knives.
http://www.spork.org/
More non-nonsensical and unproductive foolishness dreamed up by idiots.
The UK is having spasms of this, too- there's talk of eliminating knives with points- which two minutes with a bench grinder can easily restore.
The problem is not inanimate objects, but bad people-- which I guess they prefer not to address.
I recently bought, for about $9 each, these slicers at Wal-Mart:
Could you kill a person with them? Sure. And you can do the same thing with those five and eight-pound copper and lead machinist's hammers I keep in the shop.
Or this, which hangs by the door:
When you start with the wrong questions and assumptions, it's simple to reach the wrong answers...
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http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1070880&highlight=#1070880
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