| CANADIAN SHOOTING SPORTS ASSOCIATION / CANADIAN INSTITUTE FOR LEGISLATIVE ACTION
TEAM CSSA E-NEWS – Nov 10, 2013 ** Please share this E-news with your friends **
LEST WE FORGET: The CSSA salutes our proud men and women in our armed forces during Canada’s Remembrance Day. On November 11 at 11:00 am, please take the time to pay tribute to the many who have served our country. Many laid down their lives in the ultimate sacrifice so that we may continue to enjoy the bounty our beautiful country brings. Remember them and honour them, for it is their service that has made Canada great.
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COMMENTARY: OTTAWA POLICE JOIN MEDIA IN “PIXELS FOR PROPAGANDA” TRIUMPH
The Ottawa police chief is fairly giddy with the success of the recent Pixels for Pistols campaign that collected over 1,000 guns.
Sleep well, Ottawa – now you are safe. But from what and from whom? How much did it cost to assign police officers to make hundreds of house calls – and what could they have been doing instead? By their own admission, the police are championing a program specifically designed to avoid collecting guns used in crimes. The mandate of a police service is to fight crime, yet this program brazenly warns criminals that all gun serial numbers will be checked against crime gun records. In lieu of catching bad guys, the police much prefer a tryst with local media to tout yet another Pixels for Propaganda program.
It is to shudder when one reads an Ottawa Citizen quote on the gun haul and attributed to Ottawa’s top cop: “Some of them are quite old, some of them are quite new, but as you can tell they’re all very intimidating,” Chief Charles Bordeleau said before an arsenal (sic) of weapons at the Ottawa police’s evidence control room on Swansea Crescent. “We can safely say that these guns won’t be used in a crime, they won’t be used to help a person commit suicide, and will be destroyed safely.”
The residents of Ottawa have reason for concern if their police chief is intimidated by a collection of inanimate objects, many of which are antiques and WWII keepsakes. This manufactured hysteria plays perfectly to the media lapdogs who comprise the other half of the propaganda partnership.
Thankfully, there are a few reporters who refuse to compromise investigative journalism with anti-gun public relations. They need to ask Canada’s police chiefs how stealing guns from private citizens enhances safety. It is theft and probably fraud when the public is seduced into swapping a $175 camera voucher for firearms that may be worth thousands of dollars to a sport shooter or collector.
If there’s any doubt that the fix is in for responsible gun owners, consider the tender tale cited by a police-groupie Ottawa Citizen reporter. Some guy was so broke and fearful for his children’s safety that he traded his gun for a camera that he could give his wife for her birthday. As the tears flow, we have more hard-hitting “evidence” that destroying guns is the fast track to families feeling warm and fuzzy.
The Pixels for Pistols program was getting such positive media attention that the Ottawa police extended it. News stories carried by the Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Sun, CTV News, CBC News, and others have been dancing to Chief Bordeleau’s tune throughout the program. No news reports we saw dared mention that endless photo-ops of gun-laden tables serves only to stoke public fear. But, to what end? Read on.
Could it be that desperate police chiefs would fear-monger to convince municipal councils to pass their burgeoning police budgets in an era when crime is going down? If it occurs to firearms owners to ask that question, why does it escape the reporters and editors who cover the cop beat? It’s too simple – fear and unrest are selling points for both police budgets and newspapers.
While the Ottawa police engaged in chest-beating and self-satisfied photo-ops with all those nasty guns, the Ottawa Citizen ran this sidebar under the sub-head, “By the numbers”:
$159,775: total value of all vouchers for cameras issued 2,500 F°: temperature at which guns will be destroyed 1,035: total guns collected 735: total long guns, or shotguns and rifles 490: number of guns turned during last Ottawa police gun amnesty run in 2008 178: total handguns 104: total air guns 90: days the guns will be held before being destroyed 21: most guns turned in by one person 18: replicas, starter pistols, other types of non-firearms turned in 1: gun exchanged for wife’s birthday present 0: guns believed to have been used in the commission of a crime
Note the spin – the “gun” haul total only reached the psychologically-impressive four figures (1,035) by including 104 air guns and 18 non-guns. But most telling of all, the last statistic is surely a confession that the entire exercise was a waste of time as a public safety measure.
If Chief Bordeleau was the lucky recipient of one of those cheap cameras, he should take a photo “selfie” over the cutline, “I am an anti-gun shill who pretends to keep his city safe by stealing potentially valuable firearms from people who don’t know any better.”
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OTTAWA POLICE INTIMIDATED BY GUNS ON TABLE? After weeks of grabbing guns and taking names from people across Ottawa, all with the promise of a shiny new digital camera, Ottawa police revealed the total tally on Monday of guns collected during a month-long amnesty: 1,035.
“Some of them are quite old, some of them are quite new, but as you can tell they’re all very intimidating,” Chief Charles Bordeleau said before an arsenal of weapons at the Ottawa police’s evidence control room on Swansea Crescent. “We can safely say that these guns won’t be used in a crime, they won’t be used to help a person commit suicide, and will be destroyed safely.”
The 30-day amnesty, extended after what police said was a successful first two weeks, asked citizens to trade in their unwanted or unlicensed firearms for a voucher for a digital camera. In doing so, police said they would not lay any possession charges against people participating in the program. Staff Sgt. Mark Patterson had pegged his goal at 1,000 guns before the amnesty’s launch. He said he was thrilled to see his goal reached and exceeded by the collection.
“Each one of these guns kind of tells a story,” Patterson said. As head of the guns and gangs unit, which investigates all shootings in the city, Patterson was professionally ecstatic to see 178 handguns, the guns typically used in the commission of crimes in Ottawa, turned in to police.
“A lot of these could be used by some of the guys that we investigate, on the gangs side,” he said. But personally, there were some bright moments, too. One man in the Centretown area wanted to turn in a long gun out of concern for the safety of his children. With two small kids, he didn’t have any additional cash to buy his wife a birthday present, Patterson said. Swapping his gun for a camera voucher changed that. “Those are feel-good stories for us,” Patterson said.
Generally, the guns tended to come from homes with older residents who were worried about having them around children or grandchildren.
Walter Webb, 89, had tried to get rid of his Second World War-era pistol, even offering it to the Canadian War Museum before taking police up on their amnesty offer.
One of the key issues driving the amnesty was concern that unlicensed and improperly stored guns could be easily stolen by people who could then use them in committing other crimes. Police found one man storing his long gun in a suitcase in an unlocked garage in an area they consider a “hot spot” for crime, Patterson said.
Police were able to get to all the calls in the queue, at times more than a hundred people long, save for a few that police were still committed to following through on this week.
Patterson said all serial numbers have been checked and a handful will be sent for ballistics testing to be sure, but not a single gun was used in the commission of a crime. (Ottawa Citizen – November 4, 2013)
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U.S. NEWSPAPER ASKS CSSA ABOUT REGISTRY DATA CONTRACTOR: The botched Obamacare website is not the worst thing about the health care law, but it has created enormous problems for those trying to apply for insurance. CGI, the global information-technology company responsible for the debacle, previously botched Canada’s gun-registry computer systems, yet was still given a massive contract by the Obama administration. On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified on Capitol Hill, “In the last five weeks, access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for far too many of these Americans.” Mrs. Sebelius told the Senate Finance Committee hearing on Obamacare that a “couple of hundred functional fixes” were being installed on the site with the goal of making it functional by the end of November – a full two months after it went live.
The Department of Health and Human Services has not disclosed why it gave this massive contract – estimated to cost up to $600 million – to build the Obamacare website to CGI. Mr. Obama promised at a fundraiser on Monday that the site “would get fixed,” but then there needs to be a discussion “about federal procurement when it comes to IT.” Whatever the reason for giving CGI this contract, it was not based on a successful record of maintaining sensitive personal information for a government.
Tony Bernardo, the executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, that nation’s largest gun-advocacy group, is forced to help its members deal with the fallout from the disastrous Canadian gun-registration computer system. “Whoever hired CGI to do Obamacare didn’t check the background of this company,” Mr. Bernardo said in an interview. “They could screw up the Lord’s Prayer.”
The Canadian government hired CGI n the mid-1990s to develop a computerized firearms registry. (The requirement for long guns ended in 2012.) By 2002, a government audit of the registry showed that massive cost overruns had led to spending $688 million on the program to register an estimated 8 million guns in the country. Another audit four years later showed that the new system put in place was “significantly over budget project delays have contributed to about one-third of the total cost, now expected to be at least $90 million.” As a result of the enormous losses to taxpayers, Canada fired CGI in 2007, paying out an additional $10 million to end the contract. “We spent $2 billion for a list that doesn’t work,” said Mr. Bernardo said of the national gun registry. “This is all just to make a list – a database – you could do it with an Excel spreadsheet, for goodness’ sakes.”
Even worse than the financial loss for Canadians, the computer system has had repeated privacy breaches. The gun registry has been hacked at least 320 times. Plus, when the 1998 deadline for registering long guns approached, the entire website system crashed, and the records for about 275,000 guns simply vanished. A second website crash resulted in hundreds more firearms records getting lost. These breaches have serious public safety implications because criminals with access to firearms owners’ addresses put those honest citizens in danger. “CGI couldn’t keep information confidential that would stop the bad guys from getting your guns,” noted Mr. Bernardo. “How will they keep your medical information confidential? They won’t.”
Compounding Canadians’ loss of privacy, the registration has errors of some kind in up to 90 percent of all records. Gun owners have received registration certificates for firearms they don’t even own. The law-abiding are forced to research their own names and records to try to prove that their firearms are correctly registered. The system still doesn’t work, but the penalty for having certain unregistered guns in Canada is a maximum four years in prison…
CONSERVATIVES FAIL TO DELIVER ON FIREARMS ISSUE: Despite having been all but overshadowed by what ended up a drama-free vote to condemn gender selection, the most revealing glimpse into the mindset of Conservative party faithful may have come during debate on the only policy proposal to go down to defeat on the convention floor.
The thousand-odd delegates were rallying behind a resolution that directed a Conservative government to resist “any domestic or international pressure” that could encroach on its recognition of the “legitimacy” of private gun ownership.
And suddenly they found themselves facing a second proposal to reform Canada’s current gun laws. The motion would have called on the government to scrap the current Firearms Act and bring in a new law that would “recognize the right to own firearms unless that right is removed through due process of law on an individual basis.”
After several interventions in support of the resolution — which had been endorsed earlier in the day by no less a legendary gun owners’ advocate than Conservative MP Gerry (sic) Breitkreuz — a lone voice made his way to the NO microphone, where he began by identifying himself as a veteran. He agreed with the substance of the motion, he said, but was concerned by the wording, specifically, the use of the word “right.”
Gun ownership, he told the crowd, “is a privilege, not a right.” The intervention elicited audible boos, but when a vote on the motion was finally tallied it went down to a narrow defeat with 500 voting against and 477 voting in favour.
A good number of delegates, it seemed, were willing to remain hyper-vigilant against any possible resurrection of the loathed long-gun registry, but reverse onus licensing rules was a step too far.
Or, considering what would likely have happened had a similar motion gone before a Reform Party convention back in the day, perhaps a step too far back into the party’s pre-government history… (CBC News – November 4, 2013)
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SEE GARRY BREITKREUZ MP DISCUSS CONSERVATIVE MOTION ON FIREARMS: SUN NEWS VIDEO: Byline http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/featured/prime-time/867432237001/tory-gun-policy-talk/2813126303001
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BACK DOOR GUN CONTROL EVIDENCE IN THE U.S.: There are numerous alarming reasons why the US government and the military have been buying up all the ammo. Here’s one of them. Obama and the EPA just shut down the last lead smelting plant in the US. They raised the EPA regulations by 10 fold [2] and it would have cost the plant $100 million to comply. You can own all the guns you want, but if you can’t get ammo, you are out of luck.
Remember when Obama promised his minions that he was working on gun control behind the scenes? Welcome to it. Now, all domestic mined lead ore will have to be shipped overseas, refined and then shipped back to the US. Not only will ammo now be even harder to come by, the demand and the process of supply will cause the price to skyrocket even more. And ponder this… there is an excellent chance that Obama will rig the market to where all ammo has to be purchased from a government entity instituting de facto ammo registration. So much for the Second Amendment. There has not been a peep about this in the major news outlets and it is done. With the US no longer producing lead, all supplies will now have to come from China, Australia or Peru, with the overwhelming emphasis on China. More redistribution of wealth; more economic and liberty crippling of the US on tap.
The asshats at the EPA (evil protection agency) had this to say [3]: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the company “made a business decision” to shut down the smelter instead of installing pollution control technologies needed to reduce sulfur dioxide and lead emissions as required by the Clean Air Act. The Doe Run Co. announced last year that it had dropped plans to build a new lead processing facility in Herculaneum that would have used a new, cleaner lead production technology. The company cited the $100 million project as too financially risky.
The EPA is playing Mafioso I guess — we didn’t make them shut down, they made a business decision. In other words, they couldn’t pay the extortion, so the thugs shut them down. I’m pretty sure that Americans are getting ready to make their own business decision regarding the Marxists and I don’t think it will be pleasant. But Marxists will do or die and are doubling down on the destruction of energy in America, our way of life and the Constitution.
The smelting plant has known since 2010 this was coming. They couldn’t stop it and no one else rose up to stop it either. The business had been in production for 120 years [4] and now goes the way of our auto industry.
The military’s obsession with ammo was related to security and supply. They knew this was coming too, so they bought up all they could get before the plug was pulled. Screw the average American. It’s as Chris Muir [5] said, he’s not as worried about where the bullets will come from, as much as how the government will deliver them and I’m right there with him on that one.
So, back door gun control is moving forward and while we are all distracted with shiny stuff, our Second Amendment rights are just about gone. Obama is one Marxist dictator who is savvy at political chess. He has flanked the Second Amendment. Now it’s our move. (www.thedailysheeple.com – October 30, 2013)
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