Better The village Idiot than The Towm Bully

As the tragic event that occurred in Moncton this past week I commented on a posting in FB with regard to the increase of surveillance by the Harper government of social media. He has now added to that the surveillance of protesters and marchers.

My point of view and posting on the subject was that our surveillance community already suffers from information overload and that if they were not doing political party surveillance for the Harper government that perhaps they would have picked up on the potential danger that Justin Bourque presented to the community of Moncton.

I was referred to as an "idiot" for believing that this tragedy could have been prevented.

What it comes down to is the old saying "If I can save one life my work is done".

I am not a supporter of gun restriction but I do believe that the long gun registry, while not perfect, was a beginning to control who had weapons dangerous to the public and that officers could be better informed as to who they were about to confront.

People enjoy the sport of competition shooting, hunting or simply going to the range and testing their own abilities, I get that.

What I don't get is why a government does not want or care about who can purchase these weapons whose sole purpose is to kill people. It offends me that these weapons can be ordered through a mail order house and any boob can fill their cart with whatever floats their boat.

Could the tragedy in Moncton have been prevented with a more diligent and less burdened surveillance community? Perhaps. But in this case I doubt it as there were no reports about his sudden changes in behavior.

We all must accept part of the responsibility for the failure to report these observed changes in our fellow man. Had this individual been a part of a minority group and people noticed that he was speaking out in radical terms they would have reported him.

It is human nature to think that your friend is not serious and is simply voicing an opinion but the stigma of terrorism amongst minorities makes us paranoid and quick to label otherwise innocent people.

A gun registry, contrary to some fools belief, does not criminalize gun owners. Same as licensing your car does not make you a criminal. Both are lethal weapons when used by those intent on killing people.

What a registry does and should do is prevent those who are known to be unstable from obtaining a weapon. The purchase of assault weapons, the key word being assault, should call for a flagging of the gun and the owner.

You cannot prevent mental illness nor can a registry prevent the killing of innocent people however by restricting the capability of a weapon and its owner from being able to rapid fire you can reduce the number of victims.

A good example of reducing fire power would be in the case of the student shootings in Seattle this week. The weapon used was limited in the number of rounds that could be chambered and when the shooter stopped to reload the students took him down and held him until police arrived. As a result the number of victims was minimal.