doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Canadian & UK Gun Laws

Canvasback, you do emphasize an important point for those undergoing marital difficulty ...... get your guns out of the house right now and stash them at a friend's place. Do a transfer if necessary, although once the Senate votes on the abolishing of the registry, a temporary sale might be more in order.

Gentlemen - I want to thank each and every one of you who responded to my query. I have been busy with "life issues", chief among which has been the sudden need of a close friend's help due to a sudden medical problem in which removal of most of his intestines has been "the solution".

While on the subject of digestion,in a manner of speaking, there is certainly a lot here to go through! I want to give as much effort in comprehending your posts as it took to write them. Just a cursory once-over certainly will not do.

I will no doubt have more questions once I've gone through all your posts. Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your contributions and also explain my silence over the past days.

Canvasback, good post indeed. It`s the `safe storage` part that worries me as there is no real clear definition of `safe storage`
I had a meeting with my Conservative MP on Saturday, I`m on his board of directors, and told him the storage thing needs revisiting, but he is so puffed up about the Long Gun Registry he would not even think about it yet. I will be working on him as this safe storage business is bullshit as presently writte.

In the late 60's and early 70's I took a gun to school twice a week for rifle club practice at the schools indoor range. This was in Pennsylvania. You could bring your own ammunition or buy it at a discounted rate from the school. The zero tolerance firearms policy meant that you did not get a second chance for a violation of firearms and range safety rules as taught and enforced by NRA certified instructors and coaches.

I am now over 6'1" and about 225 lbs. but I was on the small side in school, only 5'10" and 145 lbs. at graduation. While in school, there were times that I was bullied by older, larger kids. It never once occurred to me that I should bring my rifle or any of the other guns that I had easy access to, and shoot the bullies. None of my many gun owning classmates ever even talked about bringing a gun to school to shoot someone. Nor did we ever hear of school shootings anywhere else. So what has changed?

I have noticed a frequent common thread that very often accompanies these mass shootings. I have also read about it, but for some strange reason, it gets scant attention. Very often, the shooter is either on anti-depressant medications, or has very recently been taken off of them. Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Amitryptyline, and other related prescription drugs appear to be strongly linked to murderous rampages. Columbine's Eric Harris was on Luvox. The killer at Virginia Tech was on anti-depressants. Try Googling "Anti-depressants mass murders" and similar searches for some eye opening reading. The commonly used ADHD drug Ritalin or Ritalin in combination with an anti depressant has been implicated in violent behavior as well.

Something is amiss here. None of this is a secret, but this link between certain prescription drugs and mass murder does not get the press and publicity it deserves. The blame for these rampages is often directed at the availability of firearms when the real cause may be the drugs that the killers have taken. This link needs to get more publicity, but the press generally would rather blame the guns, I believe. Check this out. You'll be amazed.

Kirk, are you aware that in the Ian Thompson case currently before the Ontario courts, the presiding judge found the wording of the regulations regarding "safe storage", the only charge the CA is continuing to prosecute, so confusing and difficult to understand, he has put off final arguments for several months so he, the CA and the defense can study up on it and see if they can come to some agreement about what the words even mean?

If you think having a copy of the criminal code in your vehicle will dissuade any LEO from pursuing the types of charges they have clearly been mandated to pursue, I would suggest you might be a bit naive on the subject.

On the Canadian gun BB gunnutz there are endless discussions about the detailed wording in many aspects of the regulations. The threads go on, year after year, because everyone reads and interprets them differently. No doubt an objective of the drafters of bill C68 to provide for the greatest possible utility of the powers granted under bill C68.

There IS no way to protect yourself from the apparatus of the state overstepping its bounds, as it now does daily across Canada to gun owners. One can only make an attempt, after the fact, to recover lost property and receive compensation for the defamation of character inherent in being charged with criminal offenses.

And King, with all due respect, and I believe you are due, I would suggest that if, in your seventy years of hunting and gun ownership, you have never encountered an official of the state overstepping his bounds, particularly in the last 15 years since C68 took effect, you have been lucky.

Thousands and thousands of otherwise law abiding Canadians have had different experiences in the last 15 years. Besides the obvious items in the news reports, right now there are the several thousand owners of recently "reclassified" shotguns, who, having bought a legal gun in the last 10 years, are now having them confiscated by the RCMP at the direction of the Canadian Firearms Centre.

It doesn't have to have happened to each of us personally to know it's wrong and to know it happens. Given the completely widespread abuses taking place, I would suggest you might want to rethink the message you seemed to be sending. Or perhaps I misunderstood.

keith:
Your post may in fact be one of the most relevant observations made in recent times inre. to firearms misuse and drug abuse.
I suspect that if you point this out to the "mainstream" news media it will be ignored along with anything else that goes against the grain of their socialist concepts.
Jim

Jim, here's the scoop on "socialist" media from one who started on provincial dailies age 16 and held some of the most senior responsibilities in the country. Reporters aren't media owners. The owners are rich and influential. Reporters are mostly liberal, a dirty word in your country but not ours. Generally they're attracted to the craft as notions of being useful, "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted," sort of as the Occupiers now try to bring attention to injustices.

Reporters live daily with common struggles to survive in societies where the gap widens between rich and poor every year, more now than ever. Owners of great newspapers or networks are elites. Common people like us buy their products. We're the 99 per cent, the market. Responsible media speaks to our concerns and, if truth be known, is the true guarantor of what political freedoms that remain. Canada's two most influential media empires, both conservative, are currently raging against our conservative government's authoritarian streak.

Socialist? Hardly. They're with the market, the tens of millions here and hundreds of millions there who struggle daily with capricious forces over which they seemingly have no control.

Would you have it any other way?

King:
This is probably not the appropriate place to discuss this but here's my take. The primary reason for the widening gap is the loss of the middle class. The problem is that the number of jobs that support a middle class has been steadily eroding. Anyone graduating from a good institution with a practical degree such as in engineering was baically guaranted a well paying job back when I entered the work force in the 1960s. This usually lead to "settling down" getting married, starting a family,buying a house and all the trappings that usually go along with being middle class. This is NOT the case today and many recent graduates are having a very difficult time and,in fact,are still living with their parents.

I received this(below) in an email today. The Current administration is actually bragging about Point 1. Any wonder why so many of us have nothing but disdain for "Liberals". Additionally 43% of the residents in the United States pay no income taxes at all.
Jim

"The food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever."




"Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to "please do not feed the animals" because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves"


How's that for Irony!

King, thanks for your last post - it seems many folk who use the word "socialist" don't know what it means.

"Liberal" is only a "dirty word" to some in this country, not to all.

Curiously the large newspapers and media empires in the US which are mostly owned by liberal-leaning families are beating the drums of war regarding Iran. So it's very hard to use a broad brush on the media in this country.

Re UK gun laws - I've been following with interest the articles in the last dozen or so issues of Shooting Times relating to the capricious nature of the police departments' handling of gun certificates in the UK.

Perhaps to a lesser extent we see some of the same arrogance by police and DAs in the US.

I sure would have it another way. I'd like to see the print and broadcast media in this country report the facts. I'd like to see fair and balanced coverage without the glaringly obvious left leaning tilt. When it comes to firearms and Second Amendment rights, I'd like to see reporters, editors, and publishers back off from their agenda of blaming an inanimate object and perhaps consider that there are other factors to blame for gun violence such as the breakdown of the family, the expansion of the welfare state, the widespread use of prescription drugs that have serious and deadly side effects, and maybe even more subtle causes such as societal changes in morality, religion, school prayer bans, and human secularism.

Guns were always available to us, but school massacres are a relatively recent phenomena. The liberal media in our country sides with mostly liberal politicians and liberal organizations in an orchestrated attempt to separate us from our guns while conveniently glossing over the true root causes of gun violence. If it seems like some of us have little respect for liberals, it is simply because of what they are and what they do. There is no prejudice when we are simply reacting to the unvarnished truth about what they are trying to do. I can hardly accept that it is some struggle between rich and poor, elites and commoners, which causes the obvious media bias against guns and gun owners. Anyone who denies that such bias exists is mentally defective.