Dear Editor:
It is very strange to me where (or who) came up with the number of 1,500. The term “dangerous” is not defined to any great degree as well.
All guns are dangerous in the hands of people who use them for illegal purposes. The way the ban was implemented also should be cause for concern. No debate or vote.
Sure, it is a difficult time to gather, but excluding other political parties and their input was a bad move. Ironically, these banned 1,500 types of guns will remain with owners for two years at which time a buy back program is planned. The buy back cost is estimated at $200-250 million. Is the root problem guns or people? It appears to be guns.
The long gun registry of 1995 was implemented to reduce firearm related deaths and assist police in combating these crimes. The estimated cost was $2 million. By 2012 the cost of the registry was over a billion dollars and the registry was scrapped. Seventeen years should be long enough to see if a program will work. Apparently it did not.
So now we are going to buy back guns from legal gun owners who have committed no crimes, similar to having legal gun owners register long guns even though they had not committed any crimes.
In 2018 the Liberal government committed $83 million over a five-year period to stop illegal guns coming in from the U.S. Why not take the $200 million plus the $83 million plus the billion spent on the previous gun registry and use that total towards border security and increased RCMP officers?
If Trudeau could explain how you stop a person with no moral value for human life and who will do all things illegal to accomplish their plan to murder one or more people, then I might support his plan – that is if his plan wasn’t so similar to one that already failed.
I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this gun ban.
Michael Thorp,
Mount Forest