Shooting victim Heidi Rathjen told The Hill Times that the loss of a registry of seven million rifles and shotguns is being made worse by a clause in Bill C-19 that removes current mandatory requirements for gun buyers and sellers to report firearms acquisitions and sales or even transfers from one individual to another
PARLIAMENT HILL—The government’s determination to ram a bill dismantling the federal long-gun registry through Parliament while destroying all of its records and paving the way for unrecorded sales of rifles and shotguns rocked the gun-control movement Tuesday, with a shooting victim from the Montreal Polytechnique massacre telling The Hill Times that the Conservatives will have “blood on their hands” once the effect of the new law takes hold.
Opposition MPs were also furious after six Conservative MPs barely said a word while they voted down a handful of NDP and Liberal amendments—last-ditch attempts to salvage a degree of control over gun sales and reporting once the registry is gone—to pass Bill C-19 through its final stage of study by the Commons Public Safety and National Security committee without changing even a comma.
The Conservative drive to get the bill through the committee shored up expectations the government may intend to get the bill through the Commons as quickly as possible before the 22nd anniversary next Tuesday of the Dec. 6, 1989, L’École Polytechnique massacre, when a deranged gunman shot 14 female engineering students to death, sparking a new gun-control movement that eventually led to the introduction of the registry’s Firearms Act legislation six years later.
One of the women students who was wounded but survived the attack and went on to help form Students and Graduates of Polytechnique For Gun Control, Heidi Rathjen, told The Hill Times after the government voted Bill C-19 through the committee that the loss of a registry of seven million rifles and shotguns is being made worse by a clause in the legislation that removes current mandatory requirements for gun buyers and sellers to report firearms acquisitions and sales or even transfers from one individual to another.
Ms. Rathjen predicted an explosion in black-market gun sales.
“With the registry we have had a definite reduction in gun related deaths,” she said in a telephone interview. “The women’s shelters and the police have testified that the registry and the whole system is now part of the fabric of policing.”
Ms. Rahjen said the police rely on the registry often and it works. “If you take that away, the trend will be reversed, and I’m not afraid to say that the Conservatives will have blood on their hands,” she said.
“There is going to be more murders and accidents and suicides caused by long guns because they will be more readily available, and more guns in the hands of criminals because they are opening the door wide open to fueling the black market.”
Ms. Rahjen said many Canadians cannot get licences but want guns so they will pay more for them in the black market. “They can’t get a licence because they have a criminal record, they can’t get a licence because they’ve threatened their wife, or they have mental health issues, and these people would probably be very willing to pay a little higher than the market price,” she said.
The latest reports of gun registry and licence control from the RCMP, which has supported the program and maintains the registry, show 11,713 gun licences were revoked from 2006 to last Oct. 1, either under court order or following an investigation by the Chief Firearms Officer. A total of 2,768 applications for firearms licences were refused during the same period.
Opposition MPs failed even to obtain votes on attempted committee motions to either delay or amend two of the most controversial elements of the bill—its instruction to the Commissioner of Firearms to destroy the entire data base and related systems that contain the registry’s records, which required override measures in Bill C-19 to overcome record protection provisions of the Privacy Act and the Library and Archives Canada Act, and another section that eliminates a requirement that gun dealers, individual gun sellers and gun buyers report all gun sales and transfers to the Registrar of Firearms.
Ms. Rathjen, the NDP and Liberal MPs at the committee on Tuesday said that rifles and shotguns, including the semi-automatic model mass-murderer Mark Lepine used to kill the Montreal engineering students, will be able to be bought and sold with no record or trace of who buys the guns.
In its determination to prevent any new system that could in effect create a new registry tracing system, the Conservative bill includes a clause requiring the Registrar of Firearms to destroy any record of any request by a gun seller to confirm a gun buyer has a valid gun acquisition licence.
“It means that we won’t have any gun control when it comes to rifles and shotguns,” Ms. Rathjen said. “The only way that I can explain it is that it’s a big present for the gun lobby.”
NDP MP Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) brandished photographs of four rifles, assault-rifle lookalikes and a high-powered rifle used by army snipers, as he attempted to convince the committee the government should maintain at least regular classification of rifles that are allowed to be bought and sold as unrestricted long guns. One of the models Mr. Cullen displayed was used in the L’Ecole Polytechnique massacre, and another is used as an army sniper rifle, with the potential of killing someone over a distance of two kilometres.
All of the rifles are currently classified as unrestricted long guns, and will continue to be bought and sold, with no reporting or recording requirements once Bill C-19 becomes law.
“This is not a hunting weapon,” Mr. Cullen told the committee. “This is not used by farmers to protect their livestock. This is a weapon that is designed, purchased and used as a sniper weapon. The transfer of those weapons into hands unaccountably is a clear and present danger for us.”
NDP MP Jack Harris (St. John’s East, Nfld.) dubbed Mr. Cullen’s ill-fated attempt to change the bill the “bad, scary guns amendment,” referring as well to another gun model that can be bought and sold even on the legal gun market, a shotgun model manufactured to the same specifications as a sawed-off shotgun, which is a prohibited firearm.
“You can stick it in your backpack,” said Mr. Harris. “But the people who saw off shotguns … saw them off so they can conceal them.”
Mr. Harris pointed out the shotgun, which is named The Outlaw by its manufacturer, will also be able to be bought and sold with no record once Bill C-19 becomes law.
Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner (Portage-Lisgar, Man.), a Parliamentary secretary to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (Provencher, Man.) whose private members’ bill to dismantle the registry was defeated in the last Parliament, led the Conservative MPs as they voted against the amendments, but made few comments, only making brief statements about why the government was rejecting them.
The only other Conservative MP to speak at any length, Brent Rathgeber (Edmonton-St. Albert, Alta.), intervened to accuse Mr. Cullen of contravening Commons rules by using “props” as he displayed the rifle photographs.
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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