The Conservative government moved on another campaign promise this week, introducing a bill that will kill the controversial long-gun registry.
Local MP Brent Rathgeber, applauded the move and predicted celebration from the hunters and farmer he says were unfairly targeted by the bill.
“They will be dancing in the streets once this bill passes the House and gets into the Senate.”
Rathgeber said the registry was enormously expensive and never made the public any safer.
“It made law-abiding gun owners subject to a registration system that was unnecessary.”
Norm Suvan, president of the Pioneer Gun Club, whose club is situated on the north shore of Big Lake in Sturgeon County, said he also welcomes the end of the registry.
“It was such a waste of money to begin with,” he said. “They should have applied that to more police or maybe more education about gun ownership; it was just a waste of time and money.”
Suvan said it also made him feel like a criminal, even though he is a very responsible gun owner.
Rathgeber said that was one of his biggest concerns with the registry all along.
“Hunters have felt penalized and felt criminalized by a federal registry that seeks to turn legitimate gun owners into criminals.”
National policing organizations opposed the move to scrap the registry, arguing it provided valuable information for officers.
Police groups pointed to the registry as a tool they could use to determine whether a weapon was inside a home before entering it, but Rathgeber argued that would be a false sense of security because illegal or unregistered weapons could easily be present.
“If a cop relies on that information they do so at their own peril.”
He also argued that law enforcement couldn’t possibly rely on a database, because so much crime is committed with illegal weapons.
“I think the premise that criminals don’t register their weapons is indisputable so the registry is of dubious value to law enforcement.”
Local detachment commander Insp. Warren Dosko, said the registry was a valuable tool for local police, but he agreed with Rathgeber that an officer could not completely rule out weapons in a home with the registry.
“We always assume that there could be guns, just because no guns come back on the registry doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”
He said if the registry informed an officer that guns were present inside a home it could be very helpful, because the officer would know to look for them.
“If you knew somebody had some and you didn’t come across them, it would certainly raise the awareness,” he said. “It would certainly give you the knowledge that you haven’t found any, but we know that this guy has some.”
The registry was implemented largely as a response to the 1989 Montreal massacre, in which 14 women at a Montreal university were gunned down.
Suvan said it was an emotional reaction from people who weren’t familiar with guns and it never accomplished what they hoped it would.
