TEAM CSSA E-NEWS – Sept 09, 2013
CANADIAN SHOOTING SPORTS ASSOCIATION / CANADIAN INSTITUTE FOR LEGISLATIVE ACTION
TEAM CSSA E-NEWS – Sept 09, 2013
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COMMENTARY: ALBERTA POLITICS LEAVE HIGH RIVER GUN OWNERS FUMING
Alberta Premier Alison Redford has (unknowingly) pretty much guaranteed that Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith will be re-elected in High River in 2016.
And it won’t be the first time an election was decided by responsible firearms owners. Premier Redford has turned her back on High River gun owners, who in turn let the world know they are mad as hell during the High River meeting held in a school auditorium on Thursday night.
The nasty conflict between Redford and Smith is more than mere politics. In spite of solid evidence that police confiscated guns for no reason, the premier chooses to act like an RCMP groupie. It leads one to believe that the premier encouraged local RCMP officers to boot down the doors of High River gun owners forced to vacate during the June flood. Premier Redford’s vehement support for the RCMP home invasions leads us to believe that the order to proceed was hers. Why would she suggest the police were on the side of the angels as they caused more than $3 million in damage to residents’ homes?
If we are wrong, Premier Redford, please deny our charge. We find it very odd that you have yet to deny your own involvement in the seizures that took place 11 weeks ago. This is your chance. You appear to be protecting someone, and self-preservation is perhaps a politician’s strongest instinct.
Tony Bernardo, executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association and the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action (CSSA/CILA) was in the room at the Thursday meeting hosted by High River MLA Danielle Smith. Hundreds of irate residents criticized the RCMP for conducting searches of their homes to seize guns. The police claim they were looking for people and pets left behind.
But wait. When one resident managed to get into his own home during the flood to check for damage, police arrived quickly on the scene and told him to leave. How did they know he was there? Police said that a Canadian Armed Forces helicopter detected him with a thermographic camera. So, if choppers had infrared eyes in the sky during the evacuation, please tell us again why police needed to break into homes searching for stranded life forms. The deceit is rife.
Kudos to Dennis Young, long time CSSA friend and former assistant to Garry Breitkreuz, M.P. Dennis addressed the crowd at the meeting as a former RCMP officer himself. He told residents and reporters that somebody in High River made a big mistake and noted that this kind of police behaviour would have resulted in unemployment when he was on the force.
Firearms lawyer Richard Fritze of Red Deer, Alberta made a generous offer to collect the testimonies of High River victims according to solicitor-client privilege rules. Fritze offered to take residents’ submissions for just $50 and guarantee their anonymity. In this way, the information could be used for the greater good without disclosing who provided it. Tony Bernardo told the crowd that if any residents have difficulty in paying the $50 during this time of rebuilding their lives, the CSSA would gladly provide the money to Mr. Fritze on their behalf.
Hats off to High River MLA Danielle Smith, too. Her efforts to find real answers on behalf of her constituents resulted in derision hurled at her from the government benches. The recent disrespect demonstrated by Premier Redford and a misled minister shows the government is winning the race to the bottom. In effect, the premier is saying that the RCMP are untouchable and the government doesn’t care what High River residents have to say. She should remember that sport shooters across the province are watching the debate with great vested interest.
No doubt Premier Redford will care what Albertans say at the polls in 2016 – so why not now?
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RECENTLY IN THE NEWS
ALBERTA MINISTER DROPS EFFIN’ BOMB: The political war of words over the RCMP’s flood-related confiscation of firearms in High River escalated Thursday, with a senior Tory cabinet minister unloading on the Opposition.
Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith will hold a town hall tonight in High River on the “forced entry into homes and seizure of property” by the RCMP during the massive flooding that swept through southern Alberta in June.
But Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths said Smith — who represents High River as the MLA for Highwood — was “making political hay” when she should be focusing on the real issues around rebuilding.
“It’s laughable. It’s a joke and she should be embarrassed by bringing it up,” Griffiths told the Herald on Thursday morning outside a meeting of cabinet at the McDougall Centre. “The RCMP are doing the best that they can and they did the best they can in the situation. I am sick and tired of people like her going around trying to blame people when we’re still trying to rebuild the community. It’s f—ing embarrassing.”
With the town evacuated in June, news that Mounties seized unsecured firearms from High River homes during door-to-door searches — to prevent the guns from being stolen or damaged — angered many displaced residents.
The RCMP has said almost all of the 539 weapons taken have been returned to their owners.
Smith responded to Griffiths’ colourful comments, saying concerns still linger among High Riverites about the seizure of firearms by RCMP, and, more specifically, compensation for homeowners whose houses were damaged by Mounties during the forced entries.
“Instead of getting answers I get the minister embarrassing himself by using profanity to criticize me standing up for my constituents,” Smith said. “What we need to see is some answers here, make a decision and start paying people back for the damages so they can get on with their lives.”
Smith estimated the damage — which includes broken doors, locks and windows, as well as muddied carpets — caused by the forced entries at roughly $2,000 per house, or $3.6 million…
On Tuesday, Premier Alison Redford accused the Opposition of “sensationalizing the issue.”
However, Justice Minister Jonathan Denis wrote a letter to the RCMP’s provincial commander expressing concern at the time of the confiscation. The seizure also drew negative comments from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office. The Mountie’s conduct is also the subject of an investigation by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.
Griffiths also said Thursday the government will hire a third party, likely this fall, to analyze its response to the flood. One area that likely needs work is enhanced communication between municipalities and the government, he said. (Calgary Herald – September 5, 2013)
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SCRIBBLER SEES WEDGE POLITICS IN ALBERTA: Those “American-style attack ads” that supposedly showed how debate was stooping to an unheard degree of viciousness seem pretty tame now compared to Griffiths blowing off Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith as “f**king embarrassing” for sniping at the government because the Mounties seized firearms from evacuated houses in High River during the hours after last June’s flood.
On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel a certain sympathy with Griffiths’ and the government’s frustration with the Wildrose strategy. After all, it seems pretty cynically designed to open up the old Harper Government wedge about firearms ownership and property rights without really having too much to do with the facts on the ground – or, in this case, I guess, on the water. (rabble.ca – September 6, 2013)
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HOT LINK TO HOT LEAD: The Vankleek Hill Gun Club in eastern Ontario has a new web site. Visit the site at www.vkhgc.ca
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STAR BLAMES THE KNIVES THIS TIME: There were five stabbings in as many hours across the city — from Kingston Rd. in the east to Jane St. in the west — at the start of the long weekend, and a Toronto police officer is warning that blades may actually be bloodier than bullets.
“A lot of times knives end up causing more damage than bullets, unfortunately,” Det. Marlin Bond said Saturday.“When bullets actually hit somebody, it almost cauterizes the wounds as it passes through. But with a knife, it severs the arteries and people end up bleeding out more quickly.”… (Toronto Star – August 31, 2013)
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LIBERAL MEDIA DISTORT GUN DEBATE WITH LOADED LANGUAGE: (Editor’s Note: Excerpted from the new book “Emily Gets Her Gun but Obama Wants to Take Yours” by Emily Miller, senior opinion editor at The Washington Times.)
I am a member of the mainstream media, but I’m also pro-Second Amendment. There are few in the journalism profession who share my beliefs. The public, therefore, gets a heavily biased view of firearm ownership and gun violence in America. The anti-gun media bias has had a serious impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. Most tellingly, the majority of Americans don’t know that gun violence has been going down every year. Firearm-related homicides in the U.S. have declined 39 percent in the last 30 years, according to the Justice Department. However, over half of the public wrongly believes gun violence is higher now than 20 years ago, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Only 12 percent of Americans know that firearms-related crimes are down.
The media are largely to blame for this misconception. There are two main reasons for the distortion of the facts. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a saying that originally described local TV stations that started their news broadcasts with stories about violent-crime victims, but it also applies equally to the national media after a mass shooting. The Sandy Hook massacre was particularly horrific because the victims were innocent school children, but it was a rare event, not a sign of an increase in mass shootings. Nevertheless, the media went wall to wall with coverage from Connecticut for weeks.
The big three broadcast networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – ran 216 segments on gun policy on their evening and morning shows in the month after the December 2012 Newtown shooting, according to a Media Research Center study. Of these, the stories advocating more gun control outnumbered stories featuring opposition to new restrictions by a ratio of 8 to 1. CBS was the most biased with a 22-to-1 ratio of gun control to gun-rights stories.
Once the airwaves and newspapers had been saturated, Mr. Obama and his money man New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg used the terrible crime to launch their plans to bring back the “assault weapon” ban. But the media distortion goes beyond the fact that shootings and grisly deaths interest viewers and boost ratings. Anti-gun bias also plays a role. Mainstream media outlets are based in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Few reporters are gun owners or have any familiarity with firearms. As a result, they are constantly making mistakes about simple gun terminology and functionality. Their ignorance of basic types of firearms was widely exposed after the White House released a photo of President Obama skeet shooting. Major print media outlets, including the New York Times, incorrectly labeled the gun a “rifle” instead of a shotgun.
Just to be clear, a rifle shoots a single bullet straight, while a shotgun fires a shell that usually has many pellets that scatter in a wide area. Skeet shooting – which Mr. Obama claimed he does “all the time” – is done with a shotgun in order to have a chance at hitting the small fast-moving clay target. Rifles are what the gun-grabbers want to take, not shotguns. Well, at least not yet. Almost every newspaper uses the term “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazine (or frequently “clip”) without putting quotation marks around those loaded terms.
Reporters use words such as “stockpile,” “arsenal” and “weapons of war” for the kinds of firearms and amounts of ammunition in the average gun owner’s possession. The media are continually astonished at unremarkable quantities of ammunition. A New York Times editorial in July 2012 entitled “6,000 bullets,” questioned why bulk Internet purchases of ammunition aren’t monitored by the government. A Washington Post editorial that same month mentioned the “astonishing 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition” that Aurora shooter James Holmes purchased online and asked, “Should online sales of ammunition be prohibited or more carefully scrutinized?” Apparently the writers didn’t realize that an avid shooter can easily go through over a thousand rounds at the range in a single weekend. So it’s very common, perfectly reasonable – and cost-effective – to order a large amount at one time. As I was writing the previous paragraph, I went to my closet to see how much ammunition I have. I’m no gun nut, just a woman who owns a gun for self-defense and goes to the range occasionally to train. I have 1,500 rounds of 9 mm ammunition in boxes right now. It takes up about as much space as my TiVo. (Washington Post – September 1, 2013)
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