Gun registration should be voluntary

I listened to the CBC North radio news with interest today about Monday’s unannounced fly-in visit by Cabinet minister Albina Guarnieri and Nunavut MP Nancy Karetak-Lindell to a couple of northern communities in the three territories to gather input on the gun registry.

One of the reasons I’m proud of living in Canada instead of the U.S. is gun control. I think the controversy over the past few years since the implementation of the gun registry has improved education and safety around firearms.

The gun registry, however, has hurt the Liberal Party of Canada by turning ordinary Canadians into criminals. I’m intrigued at how the role of the MP for Nunavut has changed from one of spinning Ottawa’s Firearms Act for Nunavummiut to one of gathering input from Nunavummiut about how the Firearms Act negatively affects their everyday life.

According to our current gun laws, half the people in Baker Lake are criminals. When I talk with my students, half of them have loaned a rifle or shotgun to somebody without checking to make sure they have an firearms licence or a possession licence, half of them have bought ammunition for somebody, and half of them have guns sitting around the house without trigger locks on them and not locked up in a cabinet with the gun and the ammo separated.

On an even more serious note, I will always be convinced that the tragedy of Baker Lake resident Hatti Amitnaaq, who was killed by a yearling polar bear at Corbett Inlet on the Hudson Bay coast a few years ago, was due to the family not having ammunition in the camp because of the Firearms Act. There was a rifle in the camp, but no ammo.

Two of my students are orphans because of bureaucratic stupidity from Ottawa that allowed their mother to be killed and eaten by a polar bear.

A political solution to the gun registry fiasco that might get the Liberal government off the hook would be to make registration for long guns optional and voluntary. Restricted weapons should be in the gun registry as always.

It would be easy to require every gun owner to maintain a list of his or her unrestricted long guns with serial numbers in a safe place at home. Guns could then be added to the registry if they are stolen. Names of people with outstanding gun violations would be added to the registry as always.

All the measures that were in place at the time of the urban terrorist massacre at L’école polytechnique with a restricted weapon – a military-style assault rifle – would have caught Marc Lepine before he killed the 14 women – if the measures had been enforced.

Laws cooked up in Quebec for the whole nation, including the wilderness of Nunavut, without thoughtful input from Canadians, are bound to backfire. The really stupid ones also end up costing the government and taxpayers $2 billion.

Orin Durey
Baker Lake