KAMELLE MACINTYRE
Opinions Writer

When I was a teenager way back in 1995, Bill C-68 came into law. You may also know it by it’s other name — the Firearms Registry Act.

I grew up in rural Saskatchewan and people everywhere were furious: “It’s a waste of money! The government doesn’t care about the West!” The big complaint was, of course, that the gun registry would criminalize innocent people like farmers and duck hunters — the everyday hard-working man. This was some of the rhetoric I grew up with and heard on the radio, watched on television and read in the newspapers.

   The odd thing is I do not remember anyone saying anything about the reason the gun registry was put into place. Was it the École Polytechnique massacre? I don’t recall anyone saying anything about the tragic murder of 14 women that lead to the creation of the registry in the first place. Now that the vote to abolish the gun registry has come up, the same rhetoric has re-emerged.

My views have changed with time. I feel more like Dave Barry when he described the abortion debate: “just whack each other with your signs and leave us out of this.”

I should say that the debate surrounding the gun registry, the people and the politicians who support it is fascinating. More specifically, politicians on both sides seem to have used the gun registry as a political leveraging platform and it is an issue which has highlighted the cultural divisions within our nation.

The opponents of the gun registry are for the most part rural, live in the West and male. The latter is something not emphasized by the media. It seems whenever you hear a viewpoint in opposition to the gun registry, it is coming from a man. I know of many women who hunt ducks, deer and so on, but they don’t seem to vocalise it.

What does this say about the culture of the West? Why are guns so important to us? Are hunting and farming sacred?

Meanwhile, the supporters of the gun registry are typically urban, live in Ontario or Quebec and are female. Indeed, it was a female by the name of Heidi Rathgien who created a group called the Coalition for Gun Control. Even the published figures that I’ve come across suggest that the gun registry is split on gender lines. Women seem to be the ones supporting the gun registry and men are the ones who oppose it.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government represents most of rural Canada, where the gun registry is tremendously unpopular. It is unclear if their stance on the matter — one of opposition — stems from a desire for political gains or genuine disagreement with it. The motives of those MPs who do support the gun registry are similarly ambiguous: do they support it to gain favour with a powerful group — urban females — or because of a genuine belief that guns need to be registered?

Maybe the law is inconvenient and discriminatory, and maybe it’s for the better good. Even if the gun registry really is a waste of money — a poorly enforced boondoggle of a bill — can the government really say that to the families of the victims of the Montreal Massacre? 

Tragedies often provoke a memorialization through the building of a statue, a bridge or a plaque. But in this case, we have built a series of walls between East and West, between citizens and politicians, and between rural and urban.

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image: Flickr