Owen Sound Police Chief Tells the Truth about the Gun Registry

I love it when serving police chiefs have the guts and integrity to tell the truth.  When it comes to Canada’s national failure, the gun registry, it happens so rarely.

Owen Sound Police Chief Tom Kaye was pretty outspoken about his view of the gun registry after making a presentation to the police board’s January meeting.

Reporter Scott Dunn (sdunn@thesuntimes.ca) did us all a favour by reporting Chief Kaye’s honest views on the bureaucratic nightmare:

“I don’t think that there’s a police officer out there that would tell you that their response to a call was changed as a result of a check with the gun registry.”

“There’s been a five-year amnesty on in terms of registration. We couldn’t arrest and charge anybody for it if we wanted to.After five years you can’t rely on the accuracy of it.”

Dunn reports that last August, as the debate about the gun registry was heating up for the third and final vote on Bill C-391, Chief Kaye said he thought it was “offensive” to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens if they failed to register a long gun.

He’s right.  It is offensive.

Unfortunately Toronto Police Services boss Bill Blair believes being offensive is a good thing.  Blair was one of the mouthpieces who spouted off that the sky would fall, the world would end, and Life as We Know It would come screeching to an end if the gun registry was shut down.

Blair is, of course, unable to give a single example of how and when the gun registry has saved a single life, let alone a single police constable’s life.

He’s also quick to ignore the documented case where the gun registry COST a 15-year-old his life.

As I wrote back in 2006 for Enter Stage Right,

“But 15-year-old Martin Angnatok is not a subject they want to discuss. It shines the light of reality on their little charade. And for God’s sake, don’t talk about the Firearms Act’s Aboriginal Exemption, which gave Martin’s murderer his firearm, despite a pre-existing firearms prohibition.

And let’s definitely not talk about the fact Martin’s murderer has never faced any charges, let alone a trial for killing the 15-year-old.”

Martin Angnatok was shot and killed [allegedly] by Abraham Zarpa, after Zarpa went to the local RCMP detachment and was given his hunting rifle by the RCMP.  Zarpa had a firearms prohibition order against him, but the Firearms Act’s Aboroginal Exemption meant RCMP had no choice but to give Zarpa the rifle he [allegedly] used to murder 15-year-old Martin Angnatok in cold blood.

I have to say [allegedly] because even though the whole world knows that Zarpa murdered Martin Angnatok, he’s never been tried for that murder, and never will be.

Nobody will say why not, of course.  Could it be that Canadians would be outraged at a law that demanded a violent criminal be handed the murder weapon?  Could the reason Zarpa has never seen the inside of a courtroom be something so crass as political antics over “gun control”?

As long as it’s not said in a court of law, police chiefs with no integrity, like Bill Blair, can ignore people like me who demand to know the truth behind why Zarpa has never stood trial.

It’s a national shame that our police chiefs across the country cannot be as honest with themselves and with us as Owen Sound Police Chief Tom Kaye is with his police board and his community.

Our nation would be far better off if they were.