RCMP gets a bad rap for securing guns
Theft of legal firearms by criminals is a real problem so Mounties should be praised for locking up weapons found in flooded Alberta homes
The RCMP has been taking unfriendly fire from the prime minister’s office, which is apparently anxious to court Alberta’s vociferous gun lobby, which is once again in high dudgeon.
Gosh, these guys must take umbrage lessons from Quebec’s nationalist language zealots.
And what is the Mounties’ unpardonable sin?
Uniformed police officers patrolling High River homes left unattended when 13,000 owners were forced to leave during floods had the temerity to secure firearms abandoned by their owners when they fled … and then ask for photo ID when returning the guns.
In this case, they came across weapons they thought unsafe while making sure no pets or people had been accidentally left behind, that properties were secure and that there was nobody in the buildings who might pose a threat to returning residents.
Now this might be a surprise to the prime minister’s office, but that’s what law enforcement agencies are supposed to do in a disaster zone. It’s what they did in Slave Lake when it was evacuated and, I think, it’s what most of us would hope they would do should any of us be forced to leave our homes.
In this case, patrolling Mounties said they found weapons and ammunition left in plain view. Perhaps the prime minister’s office wasn’t aware of it, but federal firearms law has strict regulations regarding the secure storage and display of guns and ammunition.
So, quite properly, it seems to me, and if we can believe the RCMP’s assistant commissioner, Marianne Ryan — and there’s no suggestion she’s being duplicitous — police officers encountering unsecured weapons immediately secured them, tagged them for return to their owners and removed them to a safe place.
Alberta Premier Alison Redford seems to believe Ryan.
“The RCMP went into a secured community that had been evacuated and, as part of that work, they went into houses where there were firearms that weren’t properly secured,” Redford told media. “And as opposed to leaving them sitting on fireplace mantels in a town that has been evacuated, they secured those guns. There was no suggestion that people will not be able to have their guns back again.”
You’d think the law and order enthusiasts in the prime minister’s office might consider this a good thing, and an example of the diligent initiative we seek in law enforcement officers. After all, the federal government’s own Criminal Intelligence Service is itself deeply concerned about the theft of domestic firearms as a prime source for the illegal weaponry obtained by organized crime.
“Once entered into the criminal market, an illicit firearm can be functional and in constant circulation for decades, potentially in the possession of numerous criminal owners,” the agency said in a report on the illegal firearms market in 2007.
“This means that there is currently a reservoir of crime guns in circulation that will continue to be used for future criminal activities,” it said. Each year, it warned, domestic thefts supplement this illicit firearms market. Indeed, Alberta itself has had a number of high profile firearm thefts recently.
Got that? Bad guys steal guns and then they use them to do bad things. Over and over.
However, the Canadian Shooting Sports Association — one of the two complainants — was reported as having decided the RCMP’s decision was not precautionary prudence but evidence of a “not- so- hidden agenda” to take firearms from citizens. “An act of aggression,” it was quoted as saying.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. There’s something nutty in this and it’s not the RCMP.
According to the Criminal Intelligence Service, there is an arsenal of 85,000 firearms known to be stolen or reported missing by their legal owners in Canada. That is a lot of firepower. You’d think the law and order gang would be concerned about keeping any potential new thefts from swelling the criminal supply.
Not the big thinkers in the prime minister’s office. The guys so concerned about our security that they recently sought power to track your online communications without a warrant; to force telecommunications service providers to disclose basic subscriber information on demand; and to force them to build secret interception and surveillance capacity into servers that government agents could tap willynilly, these folks aren’t worried about unsecured weapons lying around in abandoned houses.
So now, on the basis of two public complaints — one wonders if there was pressure from, um, some higher authority – the RCMP’s oversight body is conducting an inquiry at the request of the obviously gunshy commissioner.
Pardon me for asking, but why are we even engaged in this insufferably stupid contretemps at taxpayers’ expense? And why is the prime minister’s office meddling in it? Hasn’t it got better things to do – like strategic disaster planning?