To the editor:
I was recently visiting with some friends in Peachland and happened to read your newspaper issue of Dec. 2, 2011 and the letter of the week titled “Long Gun Registry Killed as Violence vs. Women Marked.”
Quite frankly, I don’t think I have ever read such a gender-biased, statistically-incorrect, self-serving letter in my life.
Please understand that I was a police officer and police detective in Calgary, Alberta. I experienced violence as a result of ‘domestic’ situations. I quickly learned that you should always approach a domestic complaint with extreme caution because of the unknown potential for violence by either the male or female involved in the situation. We always assumed there were firearms in the building. It would be stupid not to.
In fact, as a result of attending “domestic” complaints on different occasions, I was stabbed, beaten on the head and shoulders, and once even shot at. All of these were committed by the female person while trying to arrest the male person.
This was before a group of federal Liberal Party ‘hacks’ who knew absolutely nothing about the problem, decided to waste an extraordinary amount of taxpayers’ money. They created the National Firearms Registry.
The unfortunate statistic that no one seems to want to acknowledge, is that since the inception of the firearm registry, more citizens have been shot and killed by police officers than at any time previous. Is this a problem?
If the authors of the letter had bothered to check, they would have learned that more male persons are killed every year in Canada by female persons, than vice versa. Unfortunately, the justice(?) system being what it is, the female persons usually are allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge such as manslaughter, so the murder statistics are somewhat skewed.
Also, the authors of that letter clearly attempt to portray firearms as the only weapons used in spousal homicides. They referred to 71 per cent being killed by rifles and shotguns, 24 per cent by using a handgun, and four per cent using a sawed-off rifle or shotgun. That’s 99 per cent killed using firearms. That is completely false. What about stabbings, bludgeonings, strangulation, physical beatings, etc.?
I would suggest to the authors of the letter you printed, that if you are going to address such a serious issue as domestic spousal abuse, at least do it honestly.
What happened in Montreal in 1989 at the École Polytechnique can never be tolerated. However, because one male person couldn’t control his emotions, quit blaming all male persons for what happened.
In addition, everyone should understand that human beings are the only species on earth that kill each other for no particular purpose. “I suspect that is never going to change.
Further, when firearms are involved in serious injuries and/or deaths, it doesn’t matter whether they are registered, or not. All the National Gun Registry program did was cost an exorbitant amount of money and create employment for a lot of people who would otherwise have been unemployed.
Bruce K. Dunne,
Calgary
