From: "Gunter, Lorne (EDM_EXCHANGE)", [EMAIL PROTECTED] to appear Sunday 23 July 2000 Back in the '30s and '40s, American kids loved to play "Junior G-Men," pretending to be FBI and Treasury agents, marshals or Secret Service. Canadian kids largely missed out on this phenomenon. But fear not. This summer, Canadian university students can actually earn solid, tax-funded wages playing at being Junior G-Men, too. You'll see them if you attend a fair or stampede or boat show this year, dozens of plucky young people who have been hired by the Department of Justice to encourage gun owners to obtain one of the new firearms licenses. Sitting at booths among the slicing/dicing/chopping machines and home haircut kits, these summer employees will spin their ernest, yet chipper reminders that it is the duty of all loyal Canadian hunters and gun collectors to acquire a license by the end of this year, and to register all firearms in their possession by the end of 2002. "It's not hard, sir, and it is the law. Why? Because the government says so. Here, let me help you fill out the forms. In fact we can go on-line right now and enter your information into the government computers. No, no, no, this won't lead to confiscation. They assured us of that during our orientation and training." The Junior G-Men: Millennium Edition are well funded. Ottawa is spending tens of millions on "outreach" to the firearms community, including this golf-shirt-and-khaki legion of bureaucrats-in-training. The feds had hoped to enlist gun-owner groups in the effort. The Canadian Firearms Centre's new boss Maryantonett Flumian dangled a sizeable chunk of those tens of millions under the noses of firearms representatives in Toronto last May. But the groups resisted. Their resistance took commitment, too. Despite the propaganda spewed by anti-gunners, Canadian gun-owner organizations are not well-financed. There is nothing up hear that rivals the U.S. National Rifle Association with its four million members, multi-storey office complex, huge full-time staff and multi-million dollar budget. Most Canadian recreational firearms associations, shooting ranges and gun clubs on constantly on the verge financially. They barely break even on very modest budgets. And, unlike their anti-gun opponents, they are given no cash from government treasuries. Still, the owners' groups stuck to their guns, so to speak. They refused the bribe, leaving Justice to rely on the Junior G-Men, instead. Despite all their gumption and good-golly, though, I expect the JGM to return largely empty handed at the end of August. Their efforts will have been a flop. Of course, Justice won't concede this. The department is sitting on top of perhaps the biggest collective act of civil disobedience in Canadian legal history - the outright refusal of between two and four million gun-owning Canadians to comply with a federal law - and it barely acknowledges a problem exists. It will spin the outreach efforts as something like, "an important step toward educating Canadians to the benefits of the new law, and their obligations under it." The outreach effort may have failed to sign up more than 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000 gun owners, but Justice Minister Anne McLellan will announce herself well-pleased with the program's success in raising public awareness. She'll issue a press release perhaps predicting "we expect the summer-long outreach will lead to a much higher rate of license applications are we approach our January 1, 2001 deadline." I also expect the federal government to begin another effort this fall aimed at making its wasteful, expensive, intrusive, chaotic, counterproductive licensing and registration system look like a success. I expect it will begin to revise downward - way down - the likely number of gun owners and guns in Canada. For more than a decade, Ottawa argued there were 3 million gun owners. In the face of all sorts of conflicting evidence the true number was likely 4 or 5 million, Ottawa stuck with 3 million, a number that came from a telephone survey of just 10,000 people. The registry has signed up, at most, 608,000 owners. To make the $400 million spent to date look worthwhile, I expect Ottawa to raise the percentage of gun owners who have signed up by lowering the projected total of owners. Six hundred thousand is only 20 per cent of 3 million, but its an impressive 50 per cent of 1.2 million owners. Expect Ottawa to begin using the 1.2 to 1.5 million number shortly after Labour Day. And for those of you who are counting, here's a fact recently pried lose from Justice through access to information: the registry is employing at least 1,744 civil servants, and probably over 2,000, including perhaps 400 uniformed police. Great use of resources, isn't it? ____________________ Lorne Gunter, Columnist The Edmonton Journal Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
