Anyways, Peter Worthington has a great article at the Toronto Sun about the follies of gun control. He quotes David Horowitz saying:
Horowitz tells of a six-year-old in 1999 who walked into a Michigan classroom with a loaded handgun and shot and killed five-year-old Kayla Robbins.This case reminds of the Montreal Massacre that was used here in Canada to justify many of the gun control changes we've seen over the years. Mark Steyn did a great write up on this a while back but unfortunately the original article is AWOL. I did manage to come across this snipet curtesy of The Canukistanian:
In the ensuing public outcry against "gun violence," President Clinton held a press conference deploring the tragedy and called for mandatory trigger-locks on all handguns.
"In the fantasy world of liberal gun-control advocates, Kayla Robbins might be alive today if a trigger-lock requirement had been added to the 20,000-plus gun laws already on the books," wrote Horowitz.
"In the real world, the little boy who shot Kayla Robbins lived in a crack house run by his uncle who was a career criminal with three outstanding warrants for his arrest. He was living with his criminal uncle because his father was in jail and his drug-addicted mother was out of the picture. Is there any law the government can design that this 'family' would feel compelled to obey?"
This six-year-old did not buy the murder weapon at a gun show to avoid loopholes in existing laws. He did not buy the gun at all. He picked it up, already loaded, from a bed in the crack house where he lived.
These realities refute the idea that a trigger-lock would have saved Kayla Robbins' life.
I loathe the annual commemorations of the Montreal Massacre. I especially dislike the way it's become a state occasion, with lowered flags, like Remembrance Day. But, in this case, whatever honour we do the dead, we spend as much time dishonouring the living -- or at least the roughly 50% of Canadians who happen to be male: For women's groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lepine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.The above quote does not deal with gun control per say, but it does reflect how many gun control advocates use tragedies to pursue their political goals. In both cases gun control, or registries, would have made no difference. Yet many people agreed to impose weapon restrictions instead of looking at the underlying problem or problems that led to the tragedy.
M. Lepine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband "had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men." At 18, young Gamil took his mother's maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name "Gamil Gharbi" has not sullied its pages in the 12 years since.
Ah, well, I would bring that up, wouldn't I? Just for the record, I'm not saying that M. Lepine is representative of Algerian manhood or Muslim manhood. I'm saying he shouldn't be representative of anything -- least of all, the best efforts of women's groups and the convenient gloss of that pure laine name notwithstanding, Canadian manhood.