Wimps, cops, and common sense: reflections on the gun registry

The pundits react to yesterday's vote that kept the controversial long-gun registry alive.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or inside some plastic bubble that filters out all news from Ottawa (lucky you), you are no doubt aware that the long-gun registry survived a vote in the House of Commons yesterday. Here’s what the op-ed pages have to say about that.

The Toronto Star is predictably chuffed, calling the vote “a victory for common sense and against wedge-issue politics.” Although the registry’s critics have pointed often to its high cost and unproven record of crime prevention, the Star’s editors say “the Conservatives are not really concerned about the cost and effectiveness of the registry. Rather, they are using it as a wedge issue to target NDP and Liberal MPs from rural Canada, where the registry is unpopular.” And while the registry won’t stop all crime, “any more than registering cars and licensing drivers have stopped reckless or drunk driving,” it is still “a useful tool in the war against crime.”

The Liberals and NDPers who flip-flopped and voted for the registry are “wimps” and “runt-of-the-litter pussies,” according to a Toronto Sun editorial. (Note to Sun editors: it’s that kind of language that causes some people to say you write at an eighth grade level). Liberal and NDP members who once opposed the registry but voted along party lines “deserve the boot” for enabling “the continued harassment of law-abiding farmers, hunters, and target shooters -- all while the gangbangers and the criminals laugh their way to their never-to-be registered cache of weaponry.”

The National Post’s Lorne Gunter fears that Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police very public support for the registry “has strained our social fabric and in the process made policing in Canada much harder.” Community-police relations are based on mutual respect, Gunter writes, and now “police brass have signalled to gun owners that they have little respect for them” with their “aggressive, political, one-sided push to maintain the registry.” They can now expect decreased cooperation from the public, which is bad for everybody.