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'Another emotional disinformation campaign'

Victims of crime are no more experts on gun control than car crash victims are experts on traffic engineering

To the editor:

I am writing in response to the Guest Shot editorial, headlined Registry elimination devastating, on page A8 of your Dec. 7 edition.

Not long after the murderous rampage by a misogynistic madman in Montreal, shooting victims and their families joined forces with anti-gun lobbyists to force a Liberal government into spending billions of dollars on a registry that would do nothing to prevent such a tragedy.

Now, with a Conservative government poised to rid us of this expensive monument in futility, this lobby is once again using the tragedy for another emotional disinformation campaign.

Shooting victim Nathalie Provost calls the government's move "heartless" and ideologically driven," while Suzanne Laplante-Edward, whose daughter was killed, says, "the gun lobby has been allowed to dictate the law."

Newspapers all over the country are carrying their op-eds, which are littered with half-baked statistics from their friends at the Coalition for Gun Control, to rally support for the wasteful gun registry and to scare Canadians into thinking that women will die if the registry is put out of its misery.

There is no evidence to support the theory the registry is responsible for reduced gun deaths. This decline started long before the anti-gun lobby demanded the registry implementation.

Of the 1,400 gun deaths cited by Laplante-Edward, most were suicides.

Serious academics know the number of suicides by hanging has increased more than the number of gun suicides has dropped.

As with the Polytechnique massacre, we have vivid proof of the registry's ineffectiveness with the Dawson College shootings.

I can think of nothing more "ideologically driven" than women linking arms every year with the anti-gun lobby, using the anniversary of this atrocity to push their anti-gun agenda down our throats.

Victims of crime are no more experts on gun control than car crash victims are experts on traffic engineering.

It's high time that the anti-gun lobby stops dictating [ridiculous] gun laws.

 

Barry Glasgow

Woodlawn, Ontario