Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Martin Eliminates Crime by Decree
Who knew it could be so easy to solve complex problems like crime using nothing more than bluster? Last week, wearing his best "very, very concerned" mask, Martin declared illegal guns, well, even more illegal. I am reminded of the scene from the movie Canadian Bacon in which the U.S. President is in political trouble and the brilliant plan that his aides devise is that they need a war to prop up his sagging popularity. The plan is to trick the Canadians into provoking the U.S. to invade Canada. The scene: one of the American agent provocateur is driving a truck which has lots of derogatory anti-Canadian slogans spray-painted all over the sides. It is pulled over by a Canadian police officer. The driver starts to splutter, "But, but, but officer, it was some kids who did this at the hotel last night." The officer, politely of course, tells the driver that he has to issue a ticket because the insults are not in both official languages.
Martin's realization that handguns have to be banned during the election campaign without even breathing a word of this before the campaign smacks of opportunism and amounts to nothing more than another feel-good, do-nothing, piece of legislation like the Firearms Act, in which the primary objective was and is to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing anything. The flaws in Martin's #1 priority du jour are many.
Canada has had the tightest restrictions on handgun ownership in the industrialized world since 1934. The only legal use for privately owned handguns are for target shooting or for collecting. Firearms owners, the majority of whom are law-abiding people, have dutifully obtained licenses, registered their guns, complied with storage and transportion laws, and have jumped through all the hoops that successive governments have put into place. No amount of laws or regulations will stop a criminal intent on obtaining a gun from obtaining one. The argument that what we need is more laws is just idiotic. Criminals, by definition, don't comply with the law. What makes anyone believe that the people who have been going around murdering other people using a handgun are going to stop just because the government made the tool which they use to commit murder even more illegal than it already is? If someone is willing to commit murder, why would a minor detail, like the tool which they use to commit the murder be of concern to them or did I miss the gaping loophole in the law that gives anyone who murders using a gun a free pass?
We were told that the Firearms Registry, which was supposed to have cost $2 million is ending up at 1000 times as much, was supposed to address these problems. Many people, firearms owners and otherwise, were very suspicious over the government's motives for registering all guns arguing that the only thing that registries have ever been used for have been to confiscate guns, not catch criminals. It did not help when liars like Alan Rock spoke out of both sides of their mouths on the issue, e.g. Rock is on record as saying that he does not believe that anyone besides the police or military should own guns. Setting aside the nasty implications of the agents of the state owning all the guns, it should not come as a big surprise that people who supported the rights of firearms owners were very suspicious of this liar, Rock, and his cohorts. How could the key players who created the mess that is C-68 have been objective when he had these pre-conceived notions about who should and who should not own firearms? Anyway, with Martin's announcement last week, it should be obvious that the concerns of firearms owners were not only legitimate but that the critics who dismissed them were at best being naive. One of the points in the announcement was that the Liberals are proposing to eliminate the registration fees on long guns in the hopes that people who have not already registered, will register. After their latest gun grab, I cannot imagine too many people would be in a big rush to register their firearms because they know that the long guns are next.
Something that was pointedly omitted from Martin's announcement was how much they had budgeted to compensate the owners of the guns whose guns they were going to confiscate. Knowing how credible they have been on firearms related expenditures, whatever the Liberals claim, to be on the safe side, we should probably multiply it by at least a factor of 100.
Firearms owners have been duped into adopting the language of the anti-gun crowd, e.g. "illegal" guns. That term is utter nonsense. They have managed to convince even many gun owners that there is such a thing. Behaviours, like committing murder, are and should be illegal. Behaviours, like not filling in firearm registrations forms properly or jumping through bureaucratic hoops like registering or licensing, which are really intended to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens into submission, should not be illegal. Even if we accept the premise that there is such a thing as an "illegal" gun, the usual whipping boy for those things is the big, bad U.S. Blaming the U.S. for "illegal" guns is just as stupid as the Americans blaming Canada for undesirables who may find Canada a convenient way station on their way to the U.S. That border is manned on both sides and each side has to be responsible for looking out for its best interests instead of blaming the other side for things that are within its power to address.
For the record, I had never even touched a gun in my life until four years ago. I became the owner of multiple firearms as an act of political protest. My only regret is that I did not do it much sooner, before all the nonsensical licensing and registration requirements came into place so that I could have had the option of not registering the firearms as a real act of protest. People who argue that we're required to register lots of things, like cars for example, miss the point. Violations of the Firearms Act are Criminal Code offences. Violations of the regulations surrounding the registration of vehicles are not. Until not notifying the agents of the state of a change of address by a firearms owner is no longer a Criminal Code offence, there is no comparison. I have forgotten to change the address on my driver's license and vehicle registrations before and it did not make me an instant criminal. Not renewing my PAL (Possession and Acquisition License) or not registering my firearms would make me a criminal, though I fail to see who the victim would be in that case besides me. Those who had owned firearms for many years had to register them in order to be allowed to own something they already owned. "Kafkaesque" is the word that comes to mind.
To conclude, this is nothing more than the politics of fear (again) that the Liberals are playing. It puts the Conservatives in a bind because almost anything they say on the matter is going to be twisted into a "Do you beat your wife often?" type of question where the Conservatives will be portrayed as scary gun nuts. The unfortunate end result of this is that rational debate is silenced and the really fundamental issues surrounding private ownership of guns never get discussed. The longer that state of affairs continues, the more it favours the people who favour eliminating private ownership of guns. Sadly, history tends to repeat itself. I'm sure the intellegentsia of the day in Germany had no problems with the Nazis abolishing private ownership of guns. I am not suggesting the Liberals are Nazis. They, as well as the Conservatives, do have an authoritarian and statist bent and have some elements of fascism in their policies but they are not Nazis. However, it is foolish to assume that governments are always benign and that they can be trusted without reservations. History has shown time and again that the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.
Martin's realization that handguns have to be banned during the election campaign without even breathing a word of this before the campaign smacks of opportunism and amounts to nothing more than another feel-good, do-nothing, piece of legislation like the Firearms Act, in which the primary objective was and is to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing anything. The flaws in Martin's #1 priority du jour are many.
Canada has had the tightest restrictions on handgun ownership in the industrialized world since 1934. The only legal use for privately owned handguns are for target shooting or for collecting. Firearms owners, the majority of whom are law-abiding people, have dutifully obtained licenses, registered their guns, complied with storage and transportion laws, and have jumped through all the hoops that successive governments have put into place. No amount of laws or regulations will stop a criminal intent on obtaining a gun from obtaining one. The argument that what we need is more laws is just idiotic. Criminals, by definition, don't comply with the law. What makes anyone believe that the people who have been going around murdering other people using a handgun are going to stop just because the government made the tool which they use to commit murder even more illegal than it already is? If someone is willing to commit murder, why would a minor detail, like the tool which they use to commit the murder be of concern to them or did I miss the gaping loophole in the law that gives anyone who murders using a gun a free pass?
We were told that the Firearms Registry, which was supposed to have cost $2 million is ending up at 1000 times as much, was supposed to address these problems. Many people, firearms owners and otherwise, were very suspicious over the government's motives for registering all guns arguing that the only thing that registries have ever been used for have been to confiscate guns, not catch criminals. It did not help when liars like Alan Rock spoke out of both sides of their mouths on the issue, e.g. Rock is on record as saying that he does not believe that anyone besides the police or military should own guns. Setting aside the nasty implications of the agents of the state owning all the guns, it should not come as a big surprise that people who supported the rights of firearms owners were very suspicious of this liar, Rock, and his cohorts. How could the key players who created the mess that is C-68 have been objective when he had these pre-conceived notions about who should and who should not own firearms? Anyway, with Martin's announcement last week, it should be obvious that the concerns of firearms owners were not only legitimate but that the critics who dismissed them were at best being naive. One of the points in the announcement was that the Liberals are proposing to eliminate the registration fees on long guns in the hopes that people who have not already registered, will register. After their latest gun grab, I cannot imagine too many people would be in a big rush to register their firearms because they know that the long guns are next.
Something that was pointedly omitted from Martin's announcement was how much they had budgeted to compensate the owners of the guns whose guns they were going to confiscate. Knowing how credible they have been on firearms related expenditures, whatever the Liberals claim, to be on the safe side, we should probably multiply it by at least a factor of 100.
Firearms owners have been duped into adopting the language of the anti-gun crowd, e.g. "illegal" guns. That term is utter nonsense. They have managed to convince even many gun owners that there is such a thing. Behaviours, like committing murder, are and should be illegal. Behaviours, like not filling in firearm registrations forms properly or jumping through bureaucratic hoops like registering or licensing, which are really intended to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens into submission, should not be illegal. Even if we accept the premise that there is such a thing as an "illegal" gun, the usual whipping boy for those things is the big, bad U.S. Blaming the U.S. for "illegal" guns is just as stupid as the Americans blaming Canada for undesirables who may find Canada a convenient way station on their way to the U.S. That border is manned on both sides and each side has to be responsible for looking out for its best interests instead of blaming the other side for things that are within its power to address.
For the record, I had never even touched a gun in my life until four years ago. I became the owner of multiple firearms as an act of political protest. My only regret is that I did not do it much sooner, before all the nonsensical licensing and registration requirements came into place so that I could have had the option of not registering the firearms as a real act of protest. People who argue that we're required to register lots of things, like cars for example, miss the point. Violations of the Firearms Act are Criminal Code offences. Violations of the regulations surrounding the registration of vehicles are not. Until not notifying the agents of the state of a change of address by a firearms owner is no longer a Criminal Code offence, there is no comparison. I have forgotten to change the address on my driver's license and vehicle registrations before and it did not make me an instant criminal. Not renewing my PAL (Possession and Acquisition License) or not registering my firearms would make me a criminal, though I fail to see who the victim would be in that case besides me. Those who had owned firearms for many years had to register them in order to be allowed to own something they already owned. "Kafkaesque" is the word that comes to mind.
To conclude, this is nothing more than the politics of fear (again) that the Liberals are playing. It puts the Conservatives in a bind because almost anything they say on the matter is going to be twisted into a "Do you beat your wife often?" type of question where the Conservatives will be portrayed as scary gun nuts. The unfortunate end result of this is that rational debate is silenced and the really fundamental issues surrounding private ownership of guns never get discussed. The longer that state of affairs continues, the more it favours the people who favour eliminating private ownership of guns. Sadly, history tends to repeat itself. I'm sure the intellegentsia of the day in Germany had no problems with the Nazis abolishing private ownership of guns. I am not suggesting the Liberals are Nazis. They, as well as the Conservatives, do have an authoritarian and statist bent and have some elements of fascism in their policies but they are not Nazis. However, it is foolish to assume that governments are always benign and that they can be trusted without reservations. History has shown time and again that the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Should Canada pull troops out of Afghanistan?
In a post titled Pull the troops out of Afghanistan?, fellow blogger Andrew argues that Canada should stay because it is working under the auspices of the UN and NATO and that "Canada cannot allow the terrorists to win".
I wonder which terrorists he is referring to, the ones to our south? Canada has no business being in Afghanistan and for once, I agree with the NDP on something. I do not care if the operation was sanctioned by the Pope, Dalai Lama, and Mickey Mouse himself. The Afghanistan operation is just as dubious in terms of motive and legality as Iraq. The Bush gang were busy making threats like, "You can have a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs." in the summer of 2001 while they were trying to strong-arm the Taliban into accepting a U.S. proposal for a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. That whole 9/11 thing was a convenient excuse to invade Afghanistan, nothing more. Incidentally, what happened to capturing this arch-villain, bin Laden, who supposedly masterminded 9/11 from a cave in Afghanistan while the nation that spends more on intelligence gathering than all others combined was caught completely unawares despite having been warned but at least three foreign intelligence agencies that something big was going to happen? Google for +Mike+Vreeland+Navy+Toronto and be prepared to enter into a house of mirrors. How did this guy have foreknowledge of 9/11 a month before it happened? I managed to find a copy of a Toronto Star article that is archived here where reporter Nick Pron wrote about this interesting case.
When the U.S. was sabre-rattling post 9/11, the Taliban government did what any government would and should do - they, gasp, demanded proof before handing bin Laden over. Imagine the temerity of that lot! They even offered to hand him over to a neutral third party but the U.S. did not want any part of that. The Americans were not really interested in minor details like presenting evidence, international law, and diplomacy. It was lock-and-load time. With a Congress and a populace that had been terrorized by their own government into accepting just about any fanciful fairy tale and reinforced by a few grams of judiciously-placed white powder in envelopes in the fall of 2001, the mission was a go. (Whatever happened to that investigation? I guess once the mission was accomplished, there was no further need to investigate.) The Liberal government signed on not because of any higher moral principles (I choke at using those words in the same sentence). It signed on because it was an economically advantageous thing to do. (See the comments to Andrew's post by "Whatever". He would have Canadians stay there if it would curry favour with the U.S. in the softwood lumber dispute but since he doubts that it would, he figures we might as well bring them home. Nothing like principles I guess.) The Liberals are masters at balancing cozying up to the U.S. or bashing the U.S., depending on what is politically expedient at the moment. They do it effortlessly while the Conservatives have not quite got the hang of it yet.
Anyway, Canadian troops have no business remaining in Afghanistan, especially without serious debate in Parliament. The mission of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan has changed from a peacekeeping/peacemaking mission into an active combat mission. Most Canadians are blissfully oblivious at the fact that Canada is now at war in Afghanistan, a place which has stymied much greater powers. Liberty is not something that can be granted. It has to be earned and the price cannot be too cheap or it will never be appreciated. If the people of Afghanistan had wanted to be free of the Taliban, who are indisputably not nice guys, they would have done it without foreign intervention. (The same goes for Iraq.) We saw those heart-wrenching fuzzy videos of women being executed by a bullet to the head in the soccer stadium in Kabul by the Taliban over some inconsequential issue or another. Afghanistan has never been a country where arms were difficult to obtain and being a tribal society, honour and revenge killings were not exactly unheard of. That being the case, where was the outrage by the survivors of those women who were executed? Why did one of her male relatives, and it is usually the male relatives that this sort of thing falls to in such societies, not pick up his Kalashnikov, say his final prayers, and kill as many of the bastards who killed his female relative as he could before he himself was killed? Or, better yet, why did he not just wait for an opportune moment when he could selectively take revenge on the killers? I did not read too many stories of this nature so that has me wondering if the male relatives of the women who were executed were complicit in her murder. Perhaps she had "dishonoured" the family or tribe. Who knows? I know there was an alliance of anti-Taliban forces known as the Northern Alliance. It is not obvious or clear that they were not just as bad, albeit in different ways. It gets awfully complicated and I do not think it should fall upon us or others to intervene in situations where it is not clear that the "oppressed" have a strong desire to be free with the word "free" quite possibly meaning something much different to us than it does to them. To Afghanis, perhaps ending a civil war that had consumed an entire generation was "free" and preferable to the alternatives. Is Afghanistan now "free" now that the U.S. have turned their notoriously short attention spans elsewhere and left others to clean up the mess?
Contrast this with Rwanda, which was a place Canadians and others should have taken action and did not. That one we can lay squarely at the feet of Bill Clinton and the UN because they were playing all sorts of semantic games about whether what was going on there was an "ethnic cleansing" or a "genocide".
I wonder which terrorists he is referring to, the ones to our south? Canada has no business being in Afghanistan and for once, I agree with the NDP on something. I do not care if the operation was sanctioned by the Pope, Dalai Lama, and Mickey Mouse himself. The Afghanistan operation is just as dubious in terms of motive and legality as Iraq. The Bush gang were busy making threats like, "You can have a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs." in the summer of 2001 while they were trying to strong-arm the Taliban into accepting a U.S. proposal for a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. That whole 9/11 thing was a convenient excuse to invade Afghanistan, nothing more. Incidentally, what happened to capturing this arch-villain, bin Laden, who supposedly masterminded 9/11 from a cave in Afghanistan while the nation that spends more on intelligence gathering than all others combined was caught completely unawares despite having been warned but at least three foreign intelligence agencies that something big was going to happen? Google for +Mike+Vreeland+Navy+Toronto and be prepared to enter into a house of mirrors. How did this guy have foreknowledge of 9/11 a month before it happened? I managed to find a copy of a Toronto Star article that is archived here where reporter Nick Pron wrote about this interesting case.
When the U.S. was sabre-rattling post 9/11, the Taliban government did what any government would and should do - they, gasp, demanded proof before handing bin Laden over. Imagine the temerity of that lot! They even offered to hand him over to a neutral third party but the U.S. did not want any part of that. The Americans were not really interested in minor details like presenting evidence, international law, and diplomacy. It was lock-and-load time. With a Congress and a populace that had been terrorized by their own government into accepting just about any fanciful fairy tale and reinforced by a few grams of judiciously-placed white powder in envelopes in the fall of 2001, the mission was a go. (Whatever happened to that investigation? I guess once the mission was accomplished, there was no further need to investigate.) The Liberal government signed on not because of any higher moral principles (I choke at using those words in the same sentence). It signed on because it was an economically advantageous thing to do. (See the comments to Andrew's post by "Whatever". He would have Canadians stay there if it would curry favour with the U.S. in the softwood lumber dispute but since he doubts that it would, he figures we might as well bring them home. Nothing like principles I guess.) The Liberals are masters at balancing cozying up to the U.S. or bashing the U.S., depending on what is politically expedient at the moment. They do it effortlessly while the Conservatives have not quite got the hang of it yet.
Anyway, Canadian troops have no business remaining in Afghanistan, especially without serious debate in Parliament. The mission of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan has changed from a peacekeeping/peacemaking mission into an active combat mission. Most Canadians are blissfully oblivious at the fact that Canada is now at war in Afghanistan, a place which has stymied much greater powers. Liberty is not something that can be granted. It has to be earned and the price cannot be too cheap or it will never be appreciated. If the people of Afghanistan had wanted to be free of the Taliban, who are indisputably not nice guys, they would have done it without foreign intervention. (The same goes for Iraq.) We saw those heart-wrenching fuzzy videos of women being executed by a bullet to the head in the soccer stadium in Kabul by the Taliban over some inconsequential issue or another. Afghanistan has never been a country where arms were difficult to obtain and being a tribal society, honour and revenge killings were not exactly unheard of. That being the case, where was the outrage by the survivors of those women who were executed? Why did one of her male relatives, and it is usually the male relatives that this sort of thing falls to in such societies, not pick up his Kalashnikov, say his final prayers, and kill as many of the bastards who killed his female relative as he could before he himself was killed? Or, better yet, why did he not just wait for an opportune moment when he could selectively take revenge on the killers? I did not read too many stories of this nature so that has me wondering if the male relatives of the women who were executed were complicit in her murder. Perhaps she had "dishonoured" the family or tribe. Who knows? I know there was an alliance of anti-Taliban forces known as the Northern Alliance. It is not obvious or clear that they were not just as bad, albeit in different ways. It gets awfully complicated and I do not think it should fall upon us or others to intervene in situations where it is not clear that the "oppressed" have a strong desire to be free with the word "free" quite possibly meaning something much different to us than it does to them. To Afghanis, perhaps ending a civil war that had consumed an entire generation was "free" and preferable to the alternatives. Is Afghanistan now "free" now that the U.S. have turned their notoriously short attention spans elsewhere and left others to clean up the mess?
Contrast this with Rwanda, which was a place Canadians and others should have taken action and did not. That one we can lay squarely at the feet of Bill Clinton and the UN because they were playing all sorts of semantic games about whether what was going on there was an "ethnic cleansing" or a "genocide".
