Year: 2008

Toronto officials want people to give up their nasty, brutish habit of marksmanship, if you want to point something at objects and pull a trigger, they have an alternative for you:

The amnesty program, Pixels for Pistols, is a joint endeavour with the 26-store Henry’s camera chain, based on Church St. in Toronto. For four weeks, Toronto residents who hand over a gun, legal or not, will receive a digital camera, either a Nikon Coolpix S52 or a Coolpix P60, listed at $230 and $190 on the Henry’s website. The offer includes photography lessons.

Fortunately, some gun owners in Ontario already know they are sad, evil individuals, and are taking steps at cleansing their souls:

Among the callers was John Hope, who keeps a trigger lock on the 9-mm Beretta stowed in his Bracebridge home. He says he’s eager to give up the gun so it doesn’t land in the wrong hands – a criminal or suicidal teenager, say. Since he can’t trade it for a camera, he now plans to throw it into the middle of a lake.

Argh!  Sell that thing to a collector who would value it.  Restricted firearms in Canada are tough to come by.  It would have been like someone tossing a fine pre-ban AR-15 in a lake during the height of our assault weapons ban.

They are getting more strict:

The revised firearms and swords possession control law would ban the possession of daggers and other double-edged knives whose blades are 5.5 centimeters or longer, and swords and spears with blades of 15 cm or longer. At present, one is prohibited from owning swords, knives and spears whose blades are 15 cm or longer.

The bill would also expand the scope of a ban on gun ownership to people with such records of such criminal action as stalking and domestic violence as well as bankrupt people and those feared to commit suicide.

American gun owners should note that, despite Japan’s astronomically low crime rate, the government of Japan is not saying “Well, our controls work well — we live in a very safe society.”  No, when the weapons control laws fail, as they always will, the answer will be to squeeze tighter and tighter.