With each month that passes, the absurdity of the federal government’s gun-control legislation seems to increase.
Yorkton-Melville MP Garry Breitkreuz noted last week that the complex 137-page piece of legislation “now has 140 additional pages of mind-numbing regulations.”
As the bureaucracy lurches toward implementation of the legislation, it is becoming clear that the result will be an extremely costly administrative nightmare.
Worse, the legislation may achieve nothing but making criminals out of law-abiding firearm owners.
Aaron Eschene, policy analyst for the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, reported in the association’s magazine that the new law can require firearm owners to prove their innocence – the reverse of being considered innocent until proved guilty.
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“The .22 you’ve had in your closet for the last 30 years is suddenly going to make you a criminal if you fail to register it,” he writes. “As well, if you do register it and the government loses the paperwork, you are guilty of possessing an unregistered firearm unless you can prove otherwise; so don’t lose your paperwork.”
With more than 20 million firearms in the country, there would be ample opportunity for misfiled paperwork, and thus criminal charges.
But the bureaucratic threat doesn’t stop there. Eschene also points out that the law allows the government to make regulations “prescribing the circumstances in which an individual does or does not need firearms.” So if you haven’t lost any sheep to coyotes in the past year, someone in Ottawa can decide to take your firearms.
What will all this achieve? David Tomlinson, president of the National Firearms Association, points to RCMP statistics that show fewer than four out of every million firearms in Canada are involved in crimes.
As for safety, he says Canadian firearm owners are so responsible and law-abiding that hard-nosed insurance companies charge only $4.75 a year for $5 million in liability insurance.
“Insurance is like a bet,” Tomlinson says. “The firearms community member bets that he or she will do nothing that will damage the property of others, and will do nothing that injures or kills any other person or any livestock.
“The insurance company takes that bet, and offers to pay off at odds of over a million to one – a $5 million payoff on a $4.75 bet.”
MP Breitkreuz is demanding that the Auditor-General report on the gun law’s probable cost and benefits (or lack thereof). Every firearm owner should support that demand.
