[captain2k_ca]

Thu, March 10, 2005

Readers take direct aim at Liberal gun laws

By JOHN GLEESON -- Winnipeg Sun


When a psychopath decides to end his miserable life and take four Mounties with him, there is no public policy in the world that can prevent it. The case of James Roszko, however, has such extreme outlines that Canadians can't be faulted for demanding to know why authorities allowed things to escalate to mass murder.

Like a character straight out of Deliverance, Roszko terrorized a tiny Alberta community for years. He was prohibited from owning guns -- but everyone knew he had guns. The courts had repeated opportunities to lock him up and throw away the keys -- after all, he was a convicted pedophile who was later charged with serious offences involving firearms -- but instead Roszko walked free.

There is simply too much wrong with this picture. While the main focus in a nationwide post-mortem should be on the justice system and how the law itself was unable to tether a known menace like James Roszko, some of the most thoughtful letters written to The Sun since the tragedy have zeroed in on the Liberal gun laws and the farce known as the gun registry.

Reader after reader, from East Coast to West Coast, from small town to big city, is saying essentially the same thing. The problem isn't just that the gun laws are aimed at law-abiding citizens. It's that there are no effective gun laws for criminals and monsters like James Roszko. The registry, in that sense, is like a lethal decoy.

Larry Roberts of Winnipeg wrote: "As critics have long pointed out, 'controlling' firearms with a billion-dollar blizzard of paperwork does nothing to protect the public! Scrap the existing bureaucratic nightmare that spends as much time tracking law-abiding citizens as it does the crazies, and spend the money on a program that focuses on previous offenders, to make sure they are prohibited from access to any firearms, period.

"That way, four of Canada's finest will not have died in vain."

Here's how Joe Gingrich of Nipawin, Sask., put it: "Jim Roszko, as a criminal, was out of scope of the Firearms Act. Therefore, not only Roszko but over 176,000 Canadian criminals with firearms prohibition orders are not routinely tracked, hunted, searched, or checked to make sure they are disarmed; year after year after year.

"Our useless and unjust gun law simply targets the wrong people. The police, judges and legal prosecutors are very busy, however, making paper criminals of our citizens and using feel-good legislation to do it. Let's scrap the Liberals' Firearms Act now and make logical legislation which pertains to criminals.

"Canadians know what happened, and they also know why."

Thomas G. McVeigh of Victoria wrote: "In a time when training and funding for our police are being squeezed every way possible, I find it tragic that we have squandered precious funding on something that quite patently does not do the job it is supposed to do.

"The gun registry is now no longer up for debate."

Jeff Hyland of Halifax: "There is a lot being written on the need for stricter 'gun-control.' These writers have missed the point completely. What Canada needs today is stricter 'criminal control.' "

Jason Quinn of Fredericton, N.B., said the Mountie tragedy "proves that Canada's expensive gun registry does not prevent criminals from getting guns or ammunition, either stolen or smuggled. It simply burdens the law-abiding majority. Canada needs to prosecute the 'criminal' misuse of firearms with mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines so that everyone involved with crime is aware that they will face lengthy jail sentences if they are in possession of a firearm."

Barry Glasgow of Woodlawn, Ont., lists the various firearms offences Roszko had apparently committed, which technically could have sent him away for 69 years. Yet the fact is, he adds, "the system was unable to secure convictions on these charges or police were unwilling to investigate allegations of illegal firearms (which has been done numerous times against legitimate gun owners)."

Barry argues that the Liberal government and its supporters, "in order to save face," are choosing to ignore the reality that the system is seriously broken.

Is that it? Is it all about saving face?

Perhaps that's being too kind.

Winnipegger David Gauthier wondered how the Liberals could keep defending the gun registry as a credible law-enforcement tool in view of all the evidence we now have to the contrary. Cynically he asked, "Could this so-called 'gun registry' just be another Liberal party 'AdScam?'"

That would be my suspicion, David.