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REGISTRY FIRING BLANKS

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As I sift through the various Toronto newspapers, I have come to realize how distorted the perception of crime in your city has become.

The premier of Ontario, various high-placed police personalities and organizations such as the Coalition for Gun Control have created a maze of finger-pointing and a half-hazardly assembled set of conclusions, dismissing any true productive approach. The use of statistics has become the norm for explaining why people get shot and offer a simpleton perception of how to deal with the problem.

For instance, we're told some 50% of guns are collected by thieves from legitimate law-abiding collectors. Really? This must show that the firearms registry is doing its job, and that not only can we solve a murder mystery by looking up the gun's origins on the registry, we can also solve a break-and-enter theft that is so far unresolved.

But that, unfortunately, is just a smokescreen. To date the firearms registry has not solved any crimes, nor has it helped jail any gun-toting thugs from downtown Toronto, or even small-town Saskatchewan.

And it has created the myth that the responsible, law-abiding firearms owner is somehow part of an enormous conspiracy to arm the drug dealers.

Secondly, we hear "more than 50%" of guns used in crime are smuggled from the U.S. Not only is that a poor show for our border patrol, it is just another way to overshadow our own shortcomings by painting our neighbours as being a bad influence. Where is our police force? Where is our intelligence agency?

I find it sad that the reasons people actually pursue the interest in obtaining an illegal firearm and their disregard of the law are not really productively explored.

There is no effort to come to grips with the fact that people in your great metropolis are poor, going hungry, and a great number are desperate.

This situation should not exist in a socialist democracy, since the aim of society is to help the less fortunate. When all else fails, blame the other guys instead of our own shortsightedness.

We can continue to pretend that the Canadian firearms registry is not a total fiasco.

We can also close our eyes to the relationship of poverty and crime and focus on a symbol most consider evil to score political points and win votes.

We can continue to throw numbers at the media to inspire fear in the hearts of readers, to create doubt in the mind of average Canadians to remind them that when voting time comes around, it is ever important to cast their votes for the party that seems to be doing what needs to be done to make life safer in our communities -- regardless of it being true or not.

The sad reality is that we as a people have spent billions of dollars on a failed project, that of the firearms registry.

It is uninspired to continue to believe that the lawless will be stopped by additional or more severe legislation.

The only true utopia in Canada is that of the criminal element, since funds and resources that could be directed against them are wasted in press conferences and wordy speeches of the "success" of the firearms registry.

The only success in the minds of many is the unhindered ability for criminals to conduct business as usual. What is worse is that our politicians are cashing in on their monumental failures, and we are creating organizations and media reports to apologize in their name.