Disingenuous game with suicide stats

A good article on the effect of the LGR of suicides and rebuttal to the Wendy's of the world.

Lorne Gunter: Gun control advocates play disingenuous game with suicide stats


“In 1995, there were 1,125 firearms deaths in Canada, in 2008 it was 754, so that’s almost 400 fewer deaths per year,” Ms. Cukier told reporters. Most of the drop, she explained, was a result of fewer firearms accidents and, especially, suicides. “Experts say legislation has had a profound impact on suicides with firearms,” she contended.
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But this only matters if you care how people commit suicide, not whether they kill themselves.

There are roughly the same number of suicides committed in Canada each year. Annually between 3,500 and 3,800 Canadians decide to end their own lives, and the number has been remarkably consistent for nearly a quarter of a century.

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People intent on killing themselves may not be using guns to do so as often as they did before the registry opened in 1998, but they are still killing themselves. They are simply using other methods more now. For instance, during the time firearms suicides have declined, suicides by hanging have gone up nearly 75%. Instead of using guns, troubled Canadians have turned to ropes (and pills and poisons and gas, etc.)


In effect, she is saying it was worth spending $2 billion or $3 billion of taxpayers’ money (not to mention branding law-abiding gun owners as criminals) just so 400 or so disturbed Canadians each year could be persuaded to end their lives with a noose rather than a shotgun.

Read the full article at the National Post

Wrong serial numbers

From a gun forum:
Just bought a P38 and the serial number is not correct. They combined the real serial number and the number from the mismatched barrel assembly and left off the letter suffix. This is the third handgun I have bought that had a mistake on the registration.

Suffering from a "registry glitch"

I also suffer from a registry 'glitch'. I inherited my dads guns so we transferred every gun registered to him to me and I took the lot of guns. Turns out he had 1 more registered to him that is now in my name but the gun doesn't exist.

It is a non-existent make with no serial # which I eventually figured out was because one of the rifles was registered twice, the second time being based off of some marking on the buttstock.

So I called the registry to explain the error and have it corrected.... NOPE. The registry doesn't make mistakes I am told.

If I want that gun removed from my name in the registry I must call the police and report it stolen. They will remove it only once I submit the police report. I explained that it is a crime to fraudulently report a crime to which they told me that is the only way they will remove the non-existent gun from my name.

Registered twice

Thankfully the end is near:

So when the long gun registry came out I had 2 shot guns and a .22 registerd. 2 years ago now I had them all confiscated for unsafe storage. The police ran the serial numbers and determined that they werent registered. But offered to release them 2 months later, only if I registered them right then and there. So again I got the paperwork in the mail. Well I was cleaning out the file cabinet today and found the originals from 2003... funny same serial numbers different registration numbers.

A reply;

I had to register a rifle twice as when i sent in the ifo the forst time, i never got the registration certificate, and when i enquired was told they never got the form, but i had made copies of the forms before I sent them in, so i guess what i sent got lost on a desk some where. also another rifle I registered, I got in the mail a letter and a number, this number I was to stamp, etch on the rifle. when I enquired again about this number I was told that there was no serial number to the rifle, but i told them there was and that i had copies of the paper work that I had sent in.

Now get this, I was told that one reson was that this type of rifle had been produced so many times that the serial numbers where repeating themselves, and thats what I had to put this number on the rifle, and LOL get this, i was also told that maybe the scanner did not pick up the information I had sent in. So I redid the paper work and got it registered with out having to put new numbers on the rifle.

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