Get tough on gun crime, not on farmers

If you're sick of the long-gun registry debate, raise your hand.

Day after day, year after year, the thinking runs the gamut: register guns, don't register guns, failing to register is a crime, decriminalize failing to register.

The CBC's Rex Murphy once called the registry a billion-dollar bag of perfect uselessness. Police chiefs say it saves cops' lives, adding that the gun registry is used millions of times a year to the benefit of frontline officers. Many frontline officers say not so much.

As a cop I worked with and without a registry. Times have changed since I started walking the beat in the mid-'70s. Then, gun calls in Winnipeg were rare -- there were lots of guns but most bad guys didn't use them. Maybe penalties meant something then.

And they were still quite rare in the '80s when I was part of a small band of detectives that went to a Maryland Street address where we were greeted by the blast of a sawed-off shotgun.

One of our guys was wounded in the exchange and the assailant was killed. We didn't know the guy and he wasn't known to that address. A registry would have made no difference.

How could a gun registry have helped Sgt. Peter Savinkoff, or me, when we took in a nighttime taxi dispute on a North End street where we had a sawed-off .22 pulled on us by the fare? Nobody was hurt, but I just about filled my pants.

Sure, those are just anecdotes and hardly anything on which to base law. But to say that a registry protects cops might be a little rich if "high alert" is dependent on a government-controlled computer program.

In a report leaked earlier this week, the RCMP says that gun control is widely misunderstood and that it's a valuable program that keeps guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable. Hmmm... it didn't keep an arsenal out of the hands of confirmed lunatic James Rozsko as he picked off four Mounties, one by one, in the Mayerthorpe slaughter of 2005.

After Mayerthorpe, then-prime minister Paul Martin promised to pay $250,000 to the families of police killed in the line of duty. Some argued that was an apology mired in guilt as gangs and guns flourished while gun control floundered.

In 2007 a registry didn't protect rookie RCMP Const. Doug Scott in the far Arctic, killed by a bullet from a high-powered rifle. Or Const. Chris Worden, shot to death in Hay River, N.W.T.

Personnel policies and leadership issues within the RCMP are still being discussed as factors in those six deaths more so than any gun registry. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been sent solo to handle that taxi dispute. The Winnipeg Police Service prohibits such dispatch and that type of policy protects officers more than any registry ever will.

I hate guns. I've never been a hunter. I've never shot a duck. The one workday of the year I hated was qualifying day -- the annual excursion to the range to ensure we could hit the broad side of a barn with an assortment of weapons. Don't get me wrong, the training was of utmost importance. It's just that I hated it. But I also understand that for many of our police officers it has literally meant life or death.

It's because of the consequences of guns in the wrong hands that I see guns the way I do.

I have brother officers who have been shot right here in Winnipeg. Fortunately, it's been more than four decades since any of those were fatal.

Pistols or long guns in the wrong hands have killed innocent kids like Jane Creba, who now defines Boxing Day shopping in Toronto, and Beeper Spence and Jeff Giles in Winnipeg.

Despite tinkering with minimum sentences for firearm-related offences, our justice system has failed to send a strong, clear and lasting message when people are caught committing crimes with guns.

So with apologies to farmers, collectors and hunters -- including my old mentor, Sgt. Harry Williams, an expert shot and better hunter -- I wouldn't lose any sleep if all guns were banned except those required by various law-enforcement agencies and the military.

But that won't happen.

So alternatively, let's just scrap the registry and toast the first government that enacts sweeping and extraordinary police powers to investigate the real crime where guns are used. Let's stop bogging officers down in the labyrinth of rules that surround guns.

Leave the hunters and farmers alone and go hard on the bad guys. Let minimum sentences start at 10 years -- no parole, no plea bargains -- and go up from there. Let's invoke the toughest gun-crime laws the WORLD has ever known.

And for the smart-on-crime crowd who will argue that poor Johnny, the would-be gangster, is not thinking before he acts...

Johnny does that at his own peril.

Robert Marshall is a security consultant and a former Winnipeg police detective.

rm112800@hotmail.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 4, 2010 H1