It’s time now for Two Minutes with Lex Murphy, published every week in your hometown Nugget newspaper. Sponsored by the Country Lard Store, where 'Fat is fine, anytime!'
Country Lard! Country Lard!
It's always soft and squishy!
It's never cold and hard!
Yee haw!
---
Lex is on holiday this week. This commentary ran one year ago tonight, and in his absence, Lex asked us to publish it again. - ed.
Two Minutes with Lex Murphy
The Long Gun Registry is dead
After seventeen years and lots of political mileage by the Liberals, their fatuous long gun registry is no more. It was an ingenious election ploy created twenty years ago, designed and executed by party strategists to ensure the Grits would be re-elected. It worked for a while, but Canadians finally saw through the ruse. Today marks the end of that deception: the long gun registry has been relegated to the trash heap of Liberal ideas and failed politics.
C-68 was a sham. It was not enacted to protect Canadians from gun crime, but rather, it was born to fool voters, and thereby, to elect Liberals to government.
It wasn't until recently that Canadians realized the registry never helped reduce crime, catch criminals or protect anyone. It was all a lie. A Big Lie. And, as Adolf Hitler once said, in the primitive simplicity of the voter's minds, big lies are believable. The Liberals borrowed the idea and used it to further their own ends.
Since 1979, Canadian gun legislation has spawned enough law, rulings, interpretations and amendments to fill the Air Canada Centre. It has started arguments between neighbours, pitted rural people against city dwellers and kept a herd of writers on the payrolls of many Canadian newspapers and magazines. It's even managed to employ a few university professors who would have been more useful packing groceries at Sobeys.
The debate was always heated and often rancorous. For politicians, guns were the things that dreams are made of. Think of it: Criminals use guns to steal from others; politicians used guns to steal away votes. And while the object of desire was different, the tool was the same, and the act equally contemptible.
The Liberals preyed on fear in an ever increasing urban environment. Rural Canadians didn't have a voice. Farmers were drowned out by scared city folk, trapped inside their condos by gun toting, drug crazed punks and gang bangers. Places like Toronto and Vancouver were hotbeds of gun crime. It had to be true. Liberal MPs told them this daily.
So what happened? What changed the minds of urban voters? Why did they finally elect the Conservatives to a majority government? Well, it seems the answer was so simple that it eluded everyone except Stephen Harper's insiders. You don't have to campaign to win, just let the Liberals campaign and self destruct. The majority of Canadians, the ones that once so vehemently supported the Liberals, flip flopped.
The Conservatives did run a good ad campaign. They were stronger in the polls than both the Liberals and the NDP. But what put them on top, and Harper knew it, was that the last two Liberal leaders were so horribly inept, so poorly received by voters, that anything they said would be questioned and rejected by Canadians.
Now that the Conservatives are the government, the majority of ordinary Canadians support Harper's call for the removal of the long gun registry. They have seen through the deception planted by the Liberals so many years ago. And certainly, while you must give the PM some credit for ridding the country of this legislative millstone around our necks, you should give equal credit to Messrs Dion, Ignatieff and Rae for being such incredibly bad politicians.
The registry is gone for two equally important reasons: a well executed Conservative plan, and the general ineptitude of the people that created it, the Liberal Party of Canada.
Country Lard! Country Lard!
It's always soft and squishy!
It's never cold and hard!
Yee haw!
---
Lex is on holiday this week. This commentary ran one year ago tonight, and in his absence, Lex asked us to publish it again. - ed.
Two Minutes with Lex Murphy
The Long Gun Registry is dead
After seventeen years and lots of political mileage by the Liberals, their fatuous long gun registry is no more. It was an ingenious election ploy created twenty years ago, designed and executed by party strategists to ensure the Grits would be re-elected. It worked for a while, but Canadians finally saw through the ruse. Today marks the end of that deception: the long gun registry has been relegated to the trash heap of Liberal ideas and failed politics.
C-68 was a sham. It was not enacted to protect Canadians from gun crime, but rather, it was born to fool voters, and thereby, to elect Liberals to government.
It wasn't until recently that Canadians realized the registry never helped reduce crime, catch criminals or protect anyone. It was all a lie. A Big Lie. And, as Adolf Hitler once said, in the primitive simplicity of the voter's minds, big lies are believable. The Liberals borrowed the idea and used it to further their own ends.
Since 1979, Canadian gun legislation has spawned enough law, rulings, interpretations and amendments to fill the Air Canada Centre. It has started arguments between neighbours, pitted rural people against city dwellers and kept a herd of writers on the payrolls of many Canadian newspapers and magazines. It's even managed to employ a few university professors who would have been more useful packing groceries at Sobeys.
The debate was always heated and often rancorous. For politicians, guns were the things that dreams are made of. Think of it: Criminals use guns to steal from others; politicians used guns to steal away votes. And while the object of desire was different, the tool was the same, and the act equally contemptible.
The Liberals preyed on fear in an ever increasing urban environment. Rural Canadians didn't have a voice. Farmers were drowned out by scared city folk, trapped inside their condos by gun toting, drug crazed punks and gang bangers. Places like Toronto and Vancouver were hotbeds of gun crime. It had to be true. Liberal MPs told them this daily.
So what happened? What changed the minds of urban voters? Why did they finally elect the Conservatives to a majority government? Well, it seems the answer was so simple that it eluded everyone except Stephen Harper's insiders. You don't have to campaign to win, just let the Liberals campaign and self destruct. The majority of Canadians, the ones that once so vehemently supported the Liberals, flip flopped.
The Conservatives did run a good ad campaign. They were stronger in the polls than both the Liberals and the NDP. But what put them on top, and Harper knew it, was that the last two Liberal leaders were so horribly inept, so poorly received by voters, that anything they said would be questioned and rejected by Canadians.
Now that the Conservatives are the government, the majority of ordinary Canadians support Harper's call for the removal of the long gun registry. They have seen through the deception planted by the Liberals so many years ago. And certainly, while you must give the PM some credit for ridding the country of this legislative millstone around our necks, you should give equal credit to Messrs Dion, Ignatieff and Rae for being such incredibly bad politicians.
The registry is gone for two equally important reasons: a well executed Conservative plan, and the general ineptitude of the people that created it, the Liberal Party of Canada.
