Haven’t you heard? Guns kill.
ON DEC. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into the University of Montreal’s École polytechnique with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle, where he killed 14 women before committing suicide. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik boarded a ferry to Utoya, Norway, killing 69 people upon arrival with the aid of his Ruger Mini-14.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize the Ruger Mini-14 is an extremely dangerous weapon, correct? Apparently the Canadian government doesn’t agree, as it has decided the gun should no longer be deemed a restricted firearm.
Along with two models of sniper rifles—one that can pierce armour from more than a kilometre away and another that can hit a target within five centimetres from more than two kilometres away—the Ruger will now be removed from the list of illegal guns in Canada. It will be made available to hunters without registration, all due to the passage of a recent bill pushed through Parliament by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.
While they’re allowing dangerous weapons to hit shelves in Canada, why don’t they also allow the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun to be unrestricted? It would be so much easier to hunt with that than a regular shotgun! It may seem like a large leap between a Mini-14 and a submachine gun, but both weapons are capable of inflicting damage far greater than any hunter needs.
The way our government has handled the gun registry is deplorable. Not only will it no longer be mandatory to register unrestricted guns, but all records
of a registry accessed by police more than 14,000 times per day is about to be wiped from the face of the planet.
Guns kill: That is what they were designed to do. While most privately owned guns in Canada are used for hunting, they are still dangerous weapons that should be carefully monitored.
The purpose of the gun registry was just that. Though not everyone who owned a gun registered it, the thousands who did made up a database that could be accessed by the police to help them guage the seriousness of a situation before they dove headfirst into it.
It was also used in situations of lost or stolen firearms for retrieval. And most importantly, it was another barrier to guns being easily accessible.
We do not have a right to bear arms in Canada. We are a peace-loving nation, one that has been instrumental in the creation and implementation of peacekeeping, and one that has seen a sharp decrease in crime since the turn of the century. Guns are not peaceful. Their job is to kill, and kill they do.
While the gun registry may have cost more than expected during its inception, its current cost is minimal—and now that there is an established registry, why destroy it and waste all the money that’s already been sunk into it?
We need to make the acquisition of firearms more difficult in this country. It may be true that most of the guns used to commit crimes are illegal and unregistered—but not all of them. If one violent crime is solved because of the gun registry, then it is well worth the expense to make Canada a safer place.
Critics over the years have claimed all the gun registry does is prosecute innocent hunters. The point of the gun registry is to keep track of deadly weapons. The information required is no more intrusive than the information we give when applying for car insurance or a mortgage.
We cannot deny the fact that guns are dangerous, and while they may be fun to shoot and blow things up with, they should not be handed out to every citizen who asks for one. The Harper government needs to rethink its policy on gun control before we are left without any restriction on firearms at all.
—Andrew Ikeman
