Monday, June 6, 2011

The CACP is not balanced (Open letter to Vic Toews)

Mr. Toews,

The Canadian Association Of Chiefs Of Police president, Chief William Blair, has sought an invitation from you to participate in the Firearms Advisory Committee, claiming that his organization “would provide you with timely and balanced advice on firearms issues from the leading law enforcement organization in Canada.”

I should remind you that the CACP has been anything but balanced. While the CACP was praising Tasers to offset the negative press generated by their use, Taser International was making huge donations to the CACP’s lavish annual conferences along with CGI Group, the software company responsible for the gun registry’s computerized system.

More to the point, many among these Chiefs have publicly expressed their desire to ban guns and they have also consistently distorted the truth on this issue. At the height of the registry debate, a bogus study was released at a 1997 Chiefs of Police conference in Fredericton overstating the number of long guns “involved” in crime by a factor of 9 - including gun collections found during investigations where charges were never laid (i.e. a domestic complaint against a gun collector) or near but not involved with a crime or suicide.

The CACP claimed that 52% of firearms “found at crime scenes” or “in more than half of the criminal incidents” were rifles and shotguns. They continued to repeat this in press releases even after the RCMP objected to this interpretation of RCMP data, which actually showed that a majority of the long guns “involved” in those incidents were unrelated gun collections recovered during investigations that did not involve guns at all.

As late as January of 2004, CACP vice-president, Ottawa Police Chief Vince Bevan claimed that “these guns are commonly used in crimes” and “place police officers and citizens in danger every day”. CACP members Ottawa police Chief Brian Ford and Winnipeg’s Chief David Cassels (both known supporters of Canada’s anti-gun lobby) have gone so far as to say that the firearms were “used” in those incidents.

At a time when Toronto bureaucrats and their Liberal pals in Ottawa were pushing for a ban on handguns, Blair himself was instrumental in making sport shooters and collectors a pariah in Toronto and we saw some shaky statistics come from his office making it appear as though a majority of handguns used by Toronto thugs were taken from legal owners. To further drive home this message, Blair cooked up a plan called “Project Safe City”.

Did this plan target known thugs and convicted criminals? No, they looked up everyone who had expired licenses and searched their homes - eventually finding one miscreant engaged in illegal activities.


The CACP is not a balanced organization that would provide good advice on firearms issues. They are little more than a government funded lobby group that is more focused on political agendas than they are on public safety.

Barry Glasgow
Woodlawn, Ontario

printed from http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/37264

Friday, June 3, 2011

South African gun licensing system on "verge of collapse"..

Hmmmm....Didn't Wendy have something to do with helping to set up South Africa's registration system?.....ARTICLE

De Wet Potgieter

The backlog in gun licence renewals is so severe that the entire application processing system is on the verge of “collapsing”, an investigation by The New Age has revealed.

Sources in the South African Police’s Central Firearms Registry (CFR), speaking on condition of anonymity, said that officials were battling to clear the backlog but new applications were coming in everyday.

With 200000 applications already received, and only 1000 being processed each working day, exhausted officers at the Saps’ Criminal Record Centre (CRC) in Pretoria say they are barely making a dent on the ever-growing backlog.

Last year, Safety and Security Minister Nathi Mthethwa, said in a response to a question posed in Parliament that there had been 1365203 applications for the renewal of firearm licences in terms of the new Firearms Control Act (Firearms Act) since it came into effect. Of these applications, 499043 had been approved, 15766 denied and 2009 are on appeal. This meant that almost 850000 were still to be processed.

Besides dealing with applications sent to them for checking by the CFR, the centre is also responsible for checking criminal records for courts countrywide. The CFR also handles all applications for police clearances needed by people for a variety of purposes, including liquor licences and work permit applications.

“The police already owe us 96 hours overtime,” a senior civilian official at the centre said. “But there is no light in the tunnel. The problem lies with management at the CFR, they do not know what is going on.”

In Gauteng alone, the CRC needs to process at least 6000 renewal applications for firearm licences if they hope to make headway in clearing the backlog, another source at the centre said.

“The police simply do not have the capacity to cope,” said a member of the gun lobby group, which has been engaging with government on the licencing debacle.

“The mess at the CRC has been common knowledge for quite some time and even though they claim that the process has speeded up, this is clearly not happening. The people at CFR responsible for the evaluation of applications are not up to standard for this kind of job.”

And, as the backlog grows, more and more irate gun shop owners, security companies and individual firearm owners are turning to the courts, leaving government to defend damages claims running into millions of rand.

Pretoria attorney Jaco Kruger has sold off his general law practice to focus exclusively on lawsuits brought against police because of the shambles in the firearms industry.

“I am handling an average of 30 new such cases every month,” said Kruger, who has already handled more than 200 cases against the police.

Kruger said his court applications cost the government an average of R20000 each to defend – and he has already taken 45 such cases to the courts, with all the rulings being in favour of his clients.

The Black Gun Owners Association also resorted to the courts last year following claims by its chairman, Abios Khoele, that the Firearms Control Act placed black South Africans at a huge physical, educational and economical disadvantage, especially those most likely to suffer from violent crime, as well as the poor and the aged.

Between 2004, when the firearms licencing laws were changed, and 2010, 900 gun shops have closed down and 10000 people have lost jobs, Khoele told a press briefing last year.

His association represents 700000 people – of all races.