Posted on 12/19/2011 3:57:59 AM PST by marktwain
Unlike the rest of Canada, Quebec must think there are dangerous criminals, and even another Marc Lepine, lurking among law-abiding farmers and hunters whose names are in the doomed long-gun registry.
If that is the case, those farmers and hunters should be outraged with the Liberal government of Jean Charest.
They're being played as pawns.
Why, for example, would Quebec Public Safety Minister Robert Dutil announce his government will go to court if the Conservatives use their majority in Parliament to pass legislation abolishing the 16-year-old registry for rifles, shotguns and varmint-hunting pot-shooters?
Does he have an empty chamber in his brain?
Let's be straight. Marc Lepine, the killer behind Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique massacre in 1989, had legally purchased the rifle he used to commit that outrage.
The police okayed it, but it stopped nothing.
No gun law can make police psychics, and treating law-abiding hunters and farmers as potential killers does not bring any clarity to anyone's crystal ball.
Now, Quebec wants to set aside the billion the Chretien Liberals already squandered to set up an absolutely useless federal gun registry to set up an equally useless registry of its own -- and throw more good money after bad.
The last time we looked Quebec was drowning in its debt, not flush with cash.
"I find it unjust and unfair that the data will be destroyed without first offering the Quebec government the possibility of recuperating it," Dutil told a news conference.
He was flanked, of course, by police association members, gun-control advocates and women's groups.
But he was not flanked by someone who was actually saved by the federal gun registry.
Why? Because that person, if he or she actually exists, has never been brought forward. And, without that human prop, there is no evidence to even suggest the gun registry has benefited public safety.
The Harper government knows this, and we know this.
But, if the Charest Liberals truly want to inflict this expensive and useless legislation on their own citizens by going to court to score federal registry data, then Quebecers had best ready themselves to be robbed again.
Not at gunpoint, of course.
But at tax time.
Ironically Quebec is a hot spot for hunting tourism, even on provincial land. I guess long guns are OK as long as they are making a buck off it.
I was just thinking that. Quebec is absolutely vast. Any hunting/fishing camp recommendations?
Does anybody know whether ending the long gun registry means that you no longer have to be issued a license to purchase a weapon or does it just mean that when you purchase the weapon you do not have to register it?
I read up on the canadian gun laws a couple of weeks ago and its a 2 step process. First you get the license to own then you go to the gun store and purchase the weapon and register it.
I only really know of Anticosti Island. The deer density there is extremely high but they are not very big.
A few years ago I was talking to some fly in hunting camp owners from the far North of Quebec at a outdoor show.
At that time we talked about the gun registry and the paper work that went with it. They said the way to get around the delays and paper work was not to bring my own guns but use the ones the camp owned.
A caribou license would allow me to take 2 caribou. My grandson was 14 at the time which was too young to buy a license. Their solution for that was he could harvest one caribou on my license. "No one would every know because their camps was so remote". That is not my cup of tea.
They want American hunter's dollars so they have plans to work around the rules and regulations.
Caribou hunting does not appeal to me that much so our conversations were more about learning how they operated. We did not book a hunt and I doubt that we ever will
The government can make all kinds of rules and regulations but Quebec is so huge that enforcing them is almost impossible.
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