2006-09-15

Angry and Horrified

No.

Montreal should be a safe place. Kids should be able to go to school. This is not allowed to happen.

So how does Stephen Harper respond? Scrap the gun registry. Story here. Too early for debate my ass.

Sick sick sick.

You know they have reported that those guns, including an automatic weapon and a handgun, were legal and registered. Automatic weapons are legal in Canada? Really? This has got to change.

Nothing like this can be allowed to happen again.

5 comments:

Marieke said...

Agreed! (from someone who was there that day and NEVER wants it to happen again.)

segacs said...

Hard to tell at this point but it appears he legally bought the gun as a semi-automatic and then modified it or something. I don't know enough about guns to really comment, and this is what's rumoured but I haven't seen it confirmed, but if it's possible then it would explain how the law didn't prevent his owning the weapon. Of course, we should tighten the laws. And psychological screening for people buying guns should be mandatory. Surely, as disturbed as this guy was, it could've at least raised a red flag?

Red Rabbit said...

It's just one of those crazy things. Why should handguns be legal?

Do hunters use them? Of course not; imagine trying to bring down a moose with a beretta. They have one purpose, which is to harm people. Ditto for automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

Psychological testing, sure. But most people, particularly the most disturbed, can fake "normal" relatively well.

As for a registry, well, there is nothing to be lost by having an idea how many and which types of guns are owned by particular people. A hunter who owns a couple of deer rifles and a 1930's pistol is a wee bit different from someone who lives in the city and owns a collection of modern assault weapons...

This is so frustrating.

Anonymous said...

Criminals will always get their hands on hand guns regardless of rather they are legal or not.

They are criminals, they don't care about the laws. The people this would hurt would be the law abiding people who would never go on a shooting spree in a high school or anywhere else.

This would never take guns out of the hands of the psychos, but, it would make others unable to defend themselves against them.

Red Rabbit said...

Yes, I suppose you're right in some ways. But in other ways, that's pretty shortsighted.

1. Tight gun control allows for police suspicion of those who have guns. Not justified in most cases, but in some. And those some justify the inconvenience of the others with the privelige.

2. It makes ILLEGAL weapons more obvious when not in a sea of legal ones.

3. That protecting oneself is utter nonsense. Do you really think we would have gotten away with only (and I use the word judiciously, not to forget the importance of that one) a single death besides the shooter if several students had been armed to the teeth and had started shooting back? Or would we have had chaos, uncertainty of who the original shooter was, and several deaths?