Gun Owners' Resource

The Senate's April Fools Joke on Canada's Firearms Owners

CSSA/CILA

The Canadian Shooting Sports Association is deeply mystified by the Senate's proposed Bill to scrap the long gun registry.

“Bill S-5, only removes the requirement to retain registration certificates. It does not shut down the gun registry.”, said Tony Bernardo, Executive Director of the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action. “By including a statutory requirement to report all transactions of non-restricted firearms to the Chief Firearms Officer, and by having to receive approval for that transfer, the Bill proposes to morph theregistry to a paperless system.” He added, “ As the Chief Firearms Officer is a police official in most jurisdictions, the collected information regarding the buyer, seller and the firearm, will simply be retained as 'police files', a registry by any other name”

As the Chief Firearms Officer is provincial in jurisdiction, a system of sharing transfer information from CFO to CFO must be in place to facilitate inter-provincial transfers. The maintenance of thirteen interconnected registries, combined with the time required to transfer many thousands of firearms per day, will increase the cost of operation of the long gunregistry tenfold over the current system.

“Bill S-5 may rid the Conservatives of their Gun Registry commitment but Quebec will maintain it's beloved registry and Canadian taxpayers will once again be required to fund another giant white elephant disguised as public safety.” stated an unnamed source in the government of Canada.

“Bill S-5 is bad legislation, pure and simple, no matter what branch of government introduces it. It is simply a re-hash of the failed Bill C-24 that died on the Order Paper because of its lack of quality. Any Canadian who cares about where their money is being spent would do well to ignore this legislative disaster and support Bill C-301”added Bernardo.

Bill C-301 is the widely popular Private Members Bill introduced by Garry Breitkreuz February 9, 2009. It has received accolades from all sides of the House of Commons and the Canadian public.

For more information:

Tony Bernardo
Canadian Institute for Legislative Action (CILA)
(905) 571-2150

abernardo343@rogers.com

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Larry Whitmore
Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA)
(905) 265-0692

l.whitmore@cdnshootingsports.org