Canada Gun lobby dinner sparks outrage

[ericire12]

http://www.mississauganews.com/article/25181

March 19, 2009 08:42 AM -  A Conservative MP from Saskatchewan is coming under fire for his starring role at a gun lobby dinner in Mississauga next month where the raffle prize is a Beretta semi-automatic handgun.

Garry Breitkreuz is the scheduled guest speaker at the Canadian Shooting Sports Association's (CSSA) annual general meeting and dinner, to be held April 18 at the Best Western Hotel on Dixie Rd. in Mississauga. He's to be honoured for his private member's bill that would abolish Canada's controversial long-gun registry and relax rules on prohibited and restricted weapons.

The "special dinner draw" of this "very rare and valuable collector's item" is advertised on the association's website. Raffle tickets will be sold at the dinner for $20 each or three-for-$50.

News of the gun prize drew immediate outrage.

"We have got to be finding ways to get (handguns) off the streets, not handing them out as prizes," Liberal MP Mark Holland (Ajax-Pickering) said yesterday. "It really is an insult to a community that has seen so much gun violence and where so many people have been killed ... to give that away as a (raffle) prize."
Neither Breitkreuz (Yorkton-Melville) nor the CSSA could be immediately reached for comment.

The raffle prize is being billed as a special "Canadian Edition" of the Beretta, "the most advanced expression of technological and esthetic feature in a semi-automatic handgun."
The PX4 Storm will be used by the Canada Border Services Agency, but it will not be available to Canadian firearms owners until the Breitkreuz dinner.

The raffle has left others in disbelief, including an official at Montreal's Dawson College, where a gunman carrying a Beretta semi-automatic carbine opened fire on Sept. 13, 2006, killing one student and wounding 13 others.
NDP Leader Jack Layton (Toronto-Danforth) said he could not believe that any group would be so "callous" as to give away a handgun in the GTA, which has been plagued with gun problems.
Last year, there were more than 60 gun-related deaths in the GTA. Mississauga and Peel Region both experienced a record number of homicides, many involving handguns.

"It's the kind of thing you expect to hear south of the border  ... the fact you could pick one up in a raffle prize sends exactly the wrong message," Layton said.

The CSSA, which refers to the gun registry as "hated," calls Breitkreuz as a "voice of reason."
The CSSA's website carries the following message: "The disarming of citizens has been a tragic failure. Violent crime has increased everywhere it's been tried as it serves only to embolden the still-armed criminal."

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which supports the long-gun registry, said Breitkreuz's bill, up for second reading vote on April 22, "would seriously compromise" public safety.

The police association warns it relaxes the control on machine guns by allowing the transport of fully automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons to civilian shooting ranges and relaxes the current restrictions on handguns, semi-automatic assault and tactical weapons.

When it was introduced in 1995, the gun registry was supposed to cost $2 million but has ballooned to about $2 billion, giving critics more than enough ammunition to call for the program to be scrapped.
Since coming to power in 2006, the Conservative government has twice introduced one-year amnesties for those who haven't registered their firearms. The latest is in force until May 2009.

Exit Question: How about a DRTV Beretta giveaway, Ah?

Other Exit Question: If they could not raffle off a gun, what else could they giveaway to piss off those gun grabbers?