Go ahead, Harper. Make my day...

Quote of the day, for no other reason except I love it. I shamelessly pilfered this off Dan Simmons' website:

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you. --Don Marquis

THE GUN REGISTRY

I am one of the most ardent anti-gun people you're ever likely to meet. I hate the goddamn things. When I'm really feeling bitter, I get to thinking what a better world this would be if every handgun was confiscated and melted into slag. Because handguns, you see, exist for no reason other than to kill people. Granted, there are other uses for guns--skeet shooting, hunting, extending penis lengths--but you don't shoot skeet with an automatic. Nor do you take it into the woods to bag yourself some pheasant. And sad to say, using your weapon to proclaim your manhood...going around fully cocked, as it were...is likely to get your precious member shot off.

So you'd think I would be up in, ahem, arms over the slow death of one of the Canadian handgun registries. Nope. In fact, I'll dance on its grave and give it a 21-gun salute when it finally bites the bullet. (Geez, there are a lot of firearm puns. I'll try and restrain myself.)

I hate to argue with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, who are very much in favour of keeping the registry and even expanding it. My dad taught me to respect police officers. But he also taught me how to recognize bullshit when I smelled it, and their sacred cow has eaten its way through a barnload of Ex-Lax.

See, police forces across Canada access the gun registry up to FIVE! THOUSAND! TIMES! A DAY! to determine whether or not the house they've just been dispatched to contains a gun.
I'm sure there have been times when that information has even proven itself useful, when a gun suddenly materializes in the middle of a police-arbitrated domestic dispute, for example.
But--and I'm going out on a limb here--I bet police are surprised by the presence of a gun where it wasn't supposed to be, oh, ten times more often. What's more, very few of the guns that are shooting up the streets of Toronto every weekend are or ever will be registered. Criminals are like that, you know. They don't bother to register their weapons just because some law says they're supposed to. Scofflaws scoff at laws! Who knew?

The money that has been wasted on this redundant registry (we've had one since the Depression era) absitively posilutely boggles the brain. Its costs were originally pegged at two million dollars. Even the Auditor General is unable to detemine exactly how much has been spent, but it's much closer to two billion than two million. And for what? We've just created extra hoops for hunters to duck-walk through, while curbing gun crime not one measly bit. Plus, there's been Parliament-dodging, receipt-hiding, and book-cooking in the best Liberal mode. (And they think their biggest problem is finding a leader can parlez-vous francais. That's so funny it's actually tragic.)

Ontario's Attorney-General, Michael Bryant, was heard to bleat "If it is a concern around the management of the gun registry and the Conservatives pride themselves in being good managers, then they should do a better job of managing the gun registry."

No, Michael, you've got it wrong. The Conservatives pride themselves in being good managers of government. Which means they can and will scrap boondoggles like the sponsorship program, Kyoto...and the gun registry.