While some politicians and special interest groups in this country are pushing for stricter gun laws, our neighbors to the north are on the verge of scoring a significant victory for law-abiding gun owners.
Since coming to power in 2006, Canada’s Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has made repealing Canada’s onerous “long gun” (rifles and shotguns) registration law a major plank of its platform. But it wasn’t until voters awarded the Conservatives a parliamentary majority last year that this goal became attainable.
In an all-too-rare example of political backbone, Canada’s House of Commons voted 159 to 130 on Wednesday to end that nation’s ineffective and counterproductive long-gun registration program. The Conservatives prevailed because of their argument that firearms registration requirements, with their privacy-invasive databases, do nothing to protect law-abiding Canadians who wish to keep such firearms in their homes for protection. Moreover, as noted by repeal advocates, such registries offer a green flag to criminals, who know that because of the registry it’s unlikely that a home owner or business owner is armed.
Like clockwork, of course, gun-control advocates began raising a hue and cry that eliminating the long-gun registry would place Canadians at risk. This is the same baseless argument Americans have been hearing for years from such nanny-staters as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. But as Canadian Public Safety Minister Vic Toews recently noted, the current registry is a “billion-dollar boondoggle” that “does nothing to help put an end to gun crime, nor has it saved one Canadian life.”
It is still too early to pop the cork in celebration, since the Canadian Senate must still approve the legislation — though it seems likely to do so — and related battles continue to flare up. The provincial government in Quebec, for example, is preparing legal action to access the names of residents who have registered guns.
Harper’s government deserves praise for working to ensure that law-abiding citizens have at least some meaningful way to protect themselves, their families and their businesses without hassle from the government. Perhaps Harper’s courage and that of his Conservative Party colleagues will drift southward to America, where even many Republican elected officials quake in their boots when confronted by gun-controller Bloomberg and his many cohorts in the media elite.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He provides regular commentary to Daily Caller readers.