While Candice Hoeppner jets around the country doing her best to convince opposition MPs to support her bill to scrap the long gun registry (Bill C-391), there is a question we as a society really need to ask ourselves.

Why does Parliament show such disdain for rural Canadians?

Yes, I’m speaking of Canada’s stupid gun registry, but that’s not all.

We’ll send western Canadian farmers to jail for the “crime” of selling their grain to someone other than the Canadian Wheat Board.  Farmers east of the Manitoba/Ontario border don’t have to worry about that.  THEY are free to sell their grain to anyone they please.

But when it comes to our gun laws, it really does get ridiculous.

We’ve registered handguns in Canada since 1934. Since 1934!  Yet daily there are news stories of criminals with illegal handguns shooting people.  Mercifully it’s usually other criminals, but that’s not always the case.  Just ask Jane Creba’s grieving parents.

Over 75 years of handgun registration has done absolutely nothing to keep handguns out of the reach of criminals.  The reality is simple, even if most urban Canadians or our politicians can’t face it: criminals will get guns and no law will prevent that.

So why do we insist, as a nation, to persecute the innocent while the guilty roam free?  Good question.  I wish I had the answer.  God knows I do my best to educate people about the issue.

But education only works when someone is willing to learn, and our urban cousins and politicians just don’t seem to fall into that category.

If they did, we’d get rid of the gun registry in a heartbeat, and for lots of valid reasons, some of which I list below:

1. It does nothing to prevent crime.
2. It does not prevent criminals from getting guns
3. It turns decent, hardworking Canadians into criminals for failing to have a piece of paper beside their guns
4. Nothing in Canada’s gun laws do a thing to track violent criminals, such as 20-year-old Winnipeg man Jeremy Kyle St. Germain, who, along with the unnamed 16-year-old who shot him, had a firearms prohibition order against him.

Violent criminals are not tracked in Canada. Only law-abiding gun owners… people with firearms licenses.  Criminals with firearms prohibition orders are completely ignored by our laws.

Now that just makes no sense at all.

Common sense tells me that if you want to deal with violent criminals, then THAT is who you track.  Wasting billions tracking the people who aren’t the problem is just plain stupid.

Us rural folk get that.

Which gets us  nothing but disdain from our city cousins and politicians.

Contact your rural opposition MP and demand they support Bill C-391 to scrap Canada’s long gun registry.  Let them know an election is coming, and you can’t wait to cast your vote.

The only question you have is simple: Who will that vote be for… the incumbent…  or his/her challenger?