EDITORIAL
Saving lives is not "wasteful"

This week an OPP officer was shot and killed while making a traffic stop just north of London, Ontario. He was killed with a rifle or what anti-gun control lobbyist refer to as a ‘long gun.’

It is ironic that this same week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Canada’s gun control registry “wasteful and ineffective.” This is a tool that, among other things, allows police officers responding to a residence for domestic or unknown trouble to know whether or not there are registered weapons in the home. Is it in need of an overhaul? To be sure. But wasteful?

If one police officer’s life is saved, if one victim of domestic violence is saved because responding officers know in advance they may face a loaded weapon, how can any right thinking human being call it wasteful?

The chances are that the weapon that killed a veteran OPP officer, husband and father was legally obtained and legally held before it did its deadly deed. Most weapons used in domestic violence and even suicides are legal weapons.

Should Canadians have the right to keep weapons? Of course they should if they meet the criteria for owning them.

But what is wrong with registering them?

We have to register our cars, our pets, our snowmobiles, our boats - hell, we even register our WebKinz.

If a firearm owner has no ulterior motive, what is the harm in a registry that is privately kept and allows police to know where every legally obtained weapon is or ought to be?

People who rant about government control and the power of the state are probably just a touch too paranoid to be owning a firearm anyway. The majority of Canadians want gun control and gun registry. The police who protect us want gun registry and darn it, responsible gun owners of handguns and long guns ought to want it to at least keep the nuts out of the group.

But first and foremost here is the argument.

If a properly run and properly controlled gun registry might, just might, save the life of one innocent person or one police officer, where does the argument for abolishing the registry fall? It falls short doesn’t it? Kind of misses the target. Fires a blank. Not funny, you say?

Neither is a police funeral.