Gun and control, two words that should never be in the same sentence together, and yet, after reading an investigative report on the CBC dated March 8, I’m wondering if there isn’t some merit to the idea that maybe, just maybe, there should be some kind of registry here in Canada.
Before you flood the Barrhead Leader’s offices with calls and angry letters however, let me explain.
If you haven’t been paying attention to what the government funded news service has been reporting on, you might not know about the missing weapons and weapon accessories that our nation’s department of defense admitted they cannot find.
Even more embarrassing though, in my opinion, is that the people in charge don’t know whether these things were destroyed during training exercises, or lost in one of the world’s many theatres of war.
Isn’t that hilarious?
Not really.
Realistically, things get lost.
In the movies you never see members of either side of a gunfight scrambling around, picking up discarded and empty magazines just so they can be brought back to whichever base they came from.
I’m pretty sure they’ve got more important things to worry about.
Things like staying alive, killing the other guy, et cetera.
That being said, I’m pretty sure the reality is a bit different, at least in the sense that munitions, accessories and the weapons themselves all cost money and somewhere, somebody is writing down all of those figures.
Yes, America left a bunch of heavily armoured toys in Afghanistan and Taliban fighters quickly snatched them up.
Yes, some of Canada’s weaponry has ended up in the hands of folk most of us would not normally deal with.
I’m sure that our government would rather not have our tech fall into the wrong hands though, and I daresay there is a dressing-down procedure for an officer that leaves something behind.
I don’t know though, I’m not in the military.
I realize I wrote a column about this subject before, and it might seem like I am backpedaling on my position, but I’m not.
What I said in the March 8 issue of the Barrhead Leader, in the Too Close To Home column, remains true.
My point then was that a person might be surprised at how fast their stance changes on gun control if their loved ones were the victims instead of a stranger, and it was intended to be serious in tone.
Personally I don’t like guns, I don’t think there’s much challenge in the use of them, up close anyway.
It feels kind of like using a point-and-shoot camera, only instead of pictures, firearms make corpses instead.
I am in favour of some kind of gun registry though, just not for you or me.
If the Department of National Defense doesn’t know where its equipment is, maybe they need to register their guns.
