Apparently in Harper’s Canada criminals don’t use rifles

If you live in the city, Harper’s party is going to be tough on crime, if you live in rural Canada, he’s going to abolish the long gun registry.

The Conservatives have quietly sent out brochures to specific rural ridings across the country promising that the gun registry will be dumped. CNEWS

"We're scrapping it" says a brochure sent by Gord Brown, Conservative MP for Leeds-Grenville, a largely rural Ontario riding between Kingston and Ottawa.

"This Conservative government is scrapping the useless Liberal long-gun registry. We are taking real action to crack down on gun crime. We will not harass law-abiding hunters and farmers," it reads.

Even though Stockwell Day, Harper’s Safety Minister has continued to extend the amnesty on new long gun registration and waived renewal fees for rifle and shotgun owners, our police forces across the country actually use the gun registry everyday.

Despite the amnesties, the registry is still very much being used by police forces who access it 8,000 times a day, says Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control.

Many detachments access the registry on a daily basis, confirmed an RCMP spokesman in Calgary.

"It is extremely useful, especially in domestic situations and an essential part of the checks before you arrive on the scene is to check for possible weapons," says Sgt. Patrick Webb.

"If it was abolished it would impact on the safety of attending a lot of these violent calls."

Meanwhile as the Liberals and NDP have proposed an outright ban on assault rifles Harper has to remain obscure, falling back on his generic tough on crime rhetoric. 

When the mayor of Toronto called for a ban on hand guns in the city, after an extremely violent week, Stockwell Day showed up in town, like the NRA after a high school shooting.

A handgun ban isn't the answer to Toronto's gun violence. We want to go after the people involved in the smuggling. We say this is the way to see gun crime reduced, Day informed us.

It's not just the gun registry that is a problem for Harper, any form of gun control will not be popular with his core support base.

So the conservatives will continue to obscure where they stand on gun control and just hope that the increasing number of gun crimes in our cities, aren't committed with unregistered rifles.