We won’t abandon gun control. Not when rifles and shotguns are responsible for half the police officers killed in the line of duty in the last few years. Not when the gun registry is a vital tool that law enforcement uses every single day.
And so, when the Hoeppner bill comes to third reading in the House of Commons, we will stand united as Liberals and vote against it.
Michael Ignatieff said these words on April 19, 2010, in a speech to the Canadian Police Association. In the same breath, he announced a package of reforms to make the life-saving long-gun registry more effective, to address legitimate concerns from gun owners in rural Canada, and to bring all Canadians together to support our police officers.
I was proud to be in the audience that day.
Two weeks from now, I hope to be in the audience again—this time in the House of Commons—when MPs cast their votes on gun control.
Liberal MPs will be voting against Bill C-391, a Conservative bill to scrap the gun registry and deprive Canada’s police officers of a vital tool for public safety.
Right now, police officers across Canada check the registry more than 11,000 times every day. That number will drop to 0 unless we save the gun registry—and we need your help.
Nearly 70 percent of gun-related deaths involve a long-gun. An overwhelming number of those victims are women. Gun-control laws have reduced the rates of robberies, suicides, and firearm murders, particularly of women. The gun registry saves lives.
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have had a hate-on for gun control almost since day one. (I say “almost” because Stephen Harper actually voted for the gun registry when it was first created.) For them, this issue isn’t about public safety. (If it were, they’d vote with police officers.) Nor is it a question of saving money. (If it were, they’d support using the law enforcement tool that taxpayers have already paid for, and that only costs $4 million per year to operate. For those of you keeping track, that’s more than $30 million less than the Conservatives are spending on their lawn sign registry, and more than $1 billion less than Stephen Harper’s G20 photo-op.)
All the while, the Conservatives aren’t even trying to hide their partnership with the gun lobby. At least two government MPs have so far held fundraisers, using taxpayer-funded Parliamentary resources, to raise money for anti-gun-control advocates. (Liberal MP Marlene Jennings has already reported both cases to the Speaker of the House, to be investigated.)
Jack Layton, meanwhile, has a cunning plan. The NDP wants to scrap the gun registry, and then support Michael Ignatieff’s plan to improve it. How they intend to improve something that they’ve already scrapped is beyond me. Nobody here in Ottawa can quite figure out how this will work. Neither can Jack Layton, for that matter — how else to explain his disastrous press conference last week?
Earlier today, here in Ottawa, Liberal MPs Frank Valeriote and Marcel Proulx announced http://lpc.ca/takeaction, a website that you can use to save the gun registry.
The vote is on September 22nd. The hour is getting late. Let’s save the gun registry.
- A.G.
Adam Goldenberg, Michael Ignatieff’s speechwriter, will be blogging from the Liberal Express (almost) all summer. For up-to-the-minute reports from the bus, follow him on Twitter. Email him at adam@email.liberal.ca.
