When all else fails, Heidi Rathjen and her fellow anti-gun zealots always resort to one final cry:

You will have blood on your hands!!!

It’s as predictable as rain in Vancouver, drought in the desert and snow in Alps in winter.

It’s the final cry of those who have failed to ram their agenda down our throats by claiming that anyone who owns a firearm is just a killer-in-waiting.

The facts, naturally, never enter in to the debate for the likes of Heidi Rathjen or “Windy” Wendy Cukier.

Cukier and Rathjen scream that gun suicides will rise again after the so-called “successes” of the gun registry at reducing gun suicides.  They fail, of course, to tell the entire truth of the matter…

a) that suicides by firearm were already dropping long before the gun registry was implemented,

b) that the overall suicide rate in Canada hasn’t changed in decades, and

c) that the rise in suicides by hanging far outweigh any reduction in the numbers of suicides by firearm.

That’s not wishful thinking on my part, that’s the information from Statistics Canada, the folks who track this sort of thing.

But Windy Wendy and Lying Heidi are not about to admit anything that doesn’t further their own twisted agenda.

Heidi Rathjen, for example, is touted as being a victim of the “Montreal Massacre”, even though she was NEVER anywhere near the deranged madman, Gamil Gharbi.  She may have been on campus that day, but so were thousands of other students who were never in any danger from that lunatic..

That hardly makes her a “survivor” of the events that day.

“You will have blood on your hands!” is the cry heard from every anti-gun zealot any time a concealed carry law is passed in another American state, for example.

It doesn’t matter, of course, that in every single state (without exception I might add) that wherever concealed carry legislation is passed allowing law-abiding citizens to carry a firearm for their own protection, violent crime goes down.

It also doesn’t matter that the cities and states with the highest rate of violent crime with firearms are the very cities and states that make it illegal for a civilian to have a firearm for their own protection.

The facts NEVER matter to these people, and that is the real tragedy of this entire debate over firearms and firearm registration.

Instead of building public policy that will actually save lives, Windy Wendy and Lying Heidi are focused on the inanimate object that, in and of itself, cannot do anything.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again…

I can place a loaded handgun on my desk and leave it there for 100 years and it will NEVER hurt anyone.

Unless, of course, a HUMAN BEING picks it up and uses that firearm with evil intent.

Left alone, that firearm will simply collect dust and rust for 100 years.

What gets lost in this entire debate is not that “guns are evil” or “guns are good.”

Firearms themselves have no good or evil properties.  They are simple tools, like cars, hammers, and knives, any of which can be used to take human lives when used with negligent or evil intent.

Good or Evil are properties that can only be attributed to the actions of human beings.  We are the only ones who can make the decision to go on a shooting rampage, or drive our vehicle down a crowded sidewalk, or stab people to death.

Human Beings need to be held accountable for their actions, both good and evil.

When we insist, like Windy Wendy and Lying Heidi, that it’s the firearm that makes people do evil things, we are being disingenuous at best, and incredibly deceitful at worst.

It’s like saying Paul Bernardo is a rapist because he has a penis.

That’s ridiculous.

Paul Bernardo is a murdering rapist because he is an evil man who takes great joy in the pain and suffering of others.  Period.  The fact that he has a penis is incidental to his crimes, not the cause of them.

Gamil Gharbi wasn’t a deranged madman because he had a rifle in his hands on December 6, 1989.  He was a deranged madman because he was raised in a culture that HATED women and was taught by his father that women were his inferior, not his equal.

The firearm he used to commit his heinous crime was incidental to his crime, not the cause of it.

Gamil Gharbi was dead by his own hand long before police ever entered the building or allowed Emergency Medical personnel inside the building.

He still had over 60 bullets remaining when he killed himself.  Clearly he could have murdered a lot more people if he’d set his mind to it.  Mercifully, Gamil Gharbi took his own life long before police ever even considered entering the building.

To prove my point I’ll close with the conclusions of Teresa Z. Sourour, the Investigating Coroner in the Montreal Massacre case, a conclusion that the likes of Windy Wendy and Lying Heidi hoped nobody would ever read:

As unfortunate as this event was, it was not an exceptional one from the perspective of the emergency services. An armed attack by a single person is, in itself, an event that the SPCUM must deal with on a regular basis.

Nonetheless, we must consider the sixty (60) unused bullets that Marc Lépine left at the scene when he decided to put an end to this terrible episode, although he was in no danger: no police assault was in progress or in any obvious state of preparation. Thank heaven, he decided on his own that enough was enough.

The issue of firearms control has intentionally not been addressed. With the unlimited ammunition and time that Marc Lépine had available to him, he would probably have been able to achieve similar results even with a conventional hunting weapon, which itself is readily accessible.

On the other hand, the importance of the questions raised in respect of pre-hospital care and police emergency response are matters that are worthy of our full attention.

The deficiencies identified in relation to the emergency response call for us, in all good conscience, to give them serious thought, not so that we can assign responsibility to anyone in particular, but so that we can take corrective action to ensure that better protection is provided for human life.

Some of the questions stated in the preceding section do not require answers, since the answers are self-evident from the questions. Nonetheless, this does not mean that it is not worth acting on them, even though no formal recommendations are made.

There are numerous other questions, on the other hand, that it would be neither wise nor fair to try to answer without first hearing all of the people involved, particularly since the complexity of some elements means that various experts would have to be heard, and this was not the function of a Coroner’s investigation.

Montréal, May 10, 1991
Teresa Z. Sourour, MD, FRCPC
Investigating Coroner

As amazing as it sounds, the truth is that it took over 15 years to get Ms. Sourour’s coronoer’s report translated from French to English, during which time Canada created firearms law based entirely on the lie that gun registration would have prevented the Montreal tragedy.

That is the real horror of this event: that it was used by opportunistic anti-gun zealots to successfully claim that every person who owns a firearm is just a “Gamil Gharbi in waiting.”

I and every other law-abiding firearm owner in this country take great offense, and rightfully so, at being painted with the lunatic brush simple because we happen to like firearms.

We are NOT and have NEVER been “killers-in-waiting” as the likes of Windy Wendy and Lying Heidi would have the world believe.

Millions of law-abiding Canadians, myself included, didn’t kill ANYONE yesterday.

We haven’t’ killed anyone today.

And we’re not going to kill anyone tomorrow, either.