from: CBC News, April 12, 2010 | 7:58 PM “Suspect charged in Neepawa shooting”

Robert Patrick Ray Morand was arrested after he turned himself in at a police station in Winnipeg, RCMP said on Monday.No other suspects are being sought, RCMP said.Brent Michael David Bialkoski, 23, died early Saturday after he was shot inside a home on Third Avenue in Neepawa, which is about 160 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.The home belongs to the father of Bialkoski’s fiancée. Police have not revealed any of the circumstances leading up to the shooting, which happened just before 4:15 a.m. Saturday. Const. Miles Hiebert said the case is not connected to gang activity

From CBC News: Gun control advocates urge feds to keep registry

Last Updated: Friday, February 26, 2010 | 8:09 PM ET

Several Quebec politicians and gun control advocates are calling on federal MPs to vote to keep Canada’s long-gun registry.

The Conservative private member’s bill to abolish the registry passed second reading in the House of Commons last year, with several NDP and Liberal MPs voting with the governing Conservatives to abolish the registry

Bill C-301 will have its third reading in the House of Commons when Parliament returns from prorogation next week.

Heidi Rathjen, a survivor of Montreal’s 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, said at Friday’s news conference in Montreal that the leaders of the Liberal party and NDP need to unite against the move.

Rathjen, who has become an advocate of the registry since the massacre, said it does work.

She pointed to statistics showing the registry has helped reduce domestic violence deaths by 70 per cent since it was established as a result of the massacre.

“To Mr. Layton and Mr. Ignatieff, who both say they support gun control, I say words are not enough, it’s actions that count.” Rathjen said at the news conference.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/02/26/que-gun-registry-feds.html#ixzz0h7YNYIc1

From CBC News: Gun control advocates fight ‘misinformation’

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 8, 2009 | 3:42 PM ET

CBC News

Twenty years after the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, survivors, victims’ families, police officers and others are fighting what they are calling a campaign of misinformation about the federal long-gun registry. The groups, which also included advocates working on suicide prevention, appealed to the public to support the existing registry in a news conference in Montreal Tuesday. A private member’s bill that would eliminate the requirement to register rifles and shotguns passed first reading in the House of Commons on Nov. 4. The minority Conservative government was able get Bill C-391 approved thanks to the support of some Liberal and NDP back-benchers. Those opposition MPs were swayed by a misleading campaign promoting the bill, says Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control. “I think if you are in Quebec, it is hard to understand what is going on in the other provinces,” said Cukier. “There is a highly motivated and well-resourced gun lobby getting a lot of advice and support from the National Rifle Association in the United States.” The Conservative Party has also invested in a publicity campaign that has put pressure on opposition MPs to support the bill, Cukier said. “People keep talking about the ‘billion-dollar registry’ — which implies to many Canadians that if we eliminate the registration of rifles and shotguns, we’ll somehow save billions of dollars,” she said. “As the police have said, getting rid of the … [registry] will save at most $3 million a year.”

Useful to police

The registry is a good tool for police officers and is used on average 11,000 times a day, said Denis Côté, president of the Quebec Federation of Municipal Police Officers. Côté said he can’t understand the logic of those fighting for its abolition “I go hunting,” he said. “But people that go hunting, they have driver’s licences; they do have to register their ATV; you need a permit to drive a boat. So, how come when it comes to [registering] your firearm, it is so complicated? “It is a privilege to own a firearm.” Sylvie Haviernick’s sister, Maud, was killed in the Dec. 6, 1989, massacre at the École Polytechnique. That day Marc Lépine walked into a classroom at the engineering school and used a .223-calibre Sturm, Ruger rifle to shoot 14 women before turning it on himself. Haviernick said Tuesday that she doesn’t think many Canadians were aware of Bill C-391 until it was adopted. “I was shocked … when I saw the results of the vote,” she said. “But I think that maybe the results forced people to move.” Haviernick said she is hopeful the bill will help reignite the calls for gun control that led to the creation of the gun registry in the wake of the Polytechnique shooting. “It was not a question of [political parties]. It was a question of national consensus,” Haviernick said. “I truly believe that, again, the answer will come from us … the people. “What we need to do is … show what we gained over time and what we risk in the future [by losing the registry].” Bill C-391 now heads to a House of Commons committee for review.

From CBC: Montreal Massacre reminds us why we need gun registry

Last Updated: Friday, November 27, 2009 | 4:45 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News

Next Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, a day that will live forever in hurt.
On Dec. 6, 1989, a terrible and damaged man walked into a class at École Polytechnique with a .223-calibre rifle, ordered the men out of the room and began a march through the building that left 14 women dead and another 10 women and four men injured.
I could here a tale unfold to harrow up your soul and freeze your blood. Instead, I will direct you to the CBC.ca’s immaculate archive of news about that hideous day and its aftermath. It’s painful to watch, but it’s worthwhile for parents. For me, it’s a sad irony because in those two decades, the young women in my family grew up, went to university and entered a work world that is still a gauntlet of knives for women. My girls did everything that would have been done by the hopeful women murdered by Marc Lépine. (I worry that the parents of the dead will read this, and that sentence will hurt them. I apologize.)
Lépine used a Ruger Mini-14, the kind of gun normally used by hunters to kill gophers, groundhogs and rabbits. It’s a comfortable gun, lightweight with little recoil, and it’s semi-automatic, which means it fires without complications every time you pull the trigger (especially effective with a larger magazine of 20 bullets). It’s very accurate to begin with, but in a classroom, experts say, you couldn’t miss if you tried. And Lépine, a hater of all women, especially police officers and prominent successful women, did not.
After the Montreal Massacre, the federal government set up a gun registry. I have just re-read Dave Cullen’s recent book, Columbine, and when I read about how the U.S. has repeatedly made guns even easier to buy after that 1999 school shooting and the more than 80 in the United States since then, I feel proud of Canada.
The registry requires only this: If you buy or own a gun — and this includes rifles used by farmers and hunters, firing range enthusiasts, etc. — it must be registered. It won’t be confiscated, but law enforcement officials will know you have it. Is this so damaging to one’s own personal notion of one’s manhood?
There’s no reason to be ashamed of owning a rifle if you live rurally and make rural excursions, and no reason to object to registering your gun the same way you register your car, house, boat, dog and cat. You often register major purchases in case they turn out to be faulty. The city inspects your house to make sure it’s reliably built, your life insurer knows your health status, your home insurer prowls around, and doctors regularly probe your cavities and press your tender areas for signs of cancer.
Yes, Canada does its best to keep the country safe and organized. So this anniversary is an odd time for a small but loud rural minority to try to kill the long-gun portion of the registry. They may get their way, and that will be Canada’s means of marking 20 years since the killings.

May save a police officer’s life
The Conservatives hate the registry. But hate is a feeling. Here are the facts. The RCMP website states that there are 7.5 million licensed guns in Canada. Police agencies find the registry extremely useful, given that any time an officer goes out on a call, she or he is hypothetically in danger. In 2009, police made an average 10,800 calls a day to find out registry information.
As Canadians, we have both rights and responsibilities. Isn’t it a decent citizen’s responsibility to make a paperwork concession that may help save the life of a police officer or an abused wife? It’s the least our country asks of us.
As Stephen Hume wrote this month in the Vancouver Sun, the loud, endlessly complaining rural minority doesn’t understand the facts about gun deaths.
“Studies in both the U.S. and Canada in fact show that rates of domestic violence are comparable in urban and rural settings,” he writes. “Statistics show clearly that women are more likely to be murdered with a long gun than with a handgun. So much for the myth of the big, bad city and the moral superiority of a tranquil country life.”
Here’s another sad stat: 74 per cent of firearms recovered from suicides and suicide attempts from 1974 to 1997 were unrestricted rifles and shotguns (the easiest-to-possess category of the three categories of firearms, although all require registration). One of the reasons men commit suicide more than women is that they prefer guns, which will kill you flat out. Women do chancier things; pills don’t always work.
I don’t want depressed people to have an easy means of suicide at hand, and this is one of the conditions that the gun registry questionnaire is designed to reveal.
If Stephen Harper gets his majority government, he will certainly be honest enough — which he isn’t now — to tell you that Canadian life will change radically. The gun registry is as fragile as abortion rights. The fight over registering long guns has always seemed to me to be a symptom of status anxiety: older rural men feeling they don’t rate in Canada, and so they will make the city folk and the Easterners cave.
Of course you rate! We are all Canadians. It’s a symptom of a fractured Canada and a failure of the once-centralized government that held us together in all our disagreements.

‘That I am a woman’
And we return to the women in the classroom on that terrible day.
“Fragile.” This is how Nathalie Provost, shot by Lépine, described herself to the CBC’s Francine Pelletier five years after the bloodbath. She was working as an engineer outside Montreal.
“What did you learn?” Pelletier asked.
“That I am a woman. I cannot ignore that fact. I realize that I am fragile. I always thought that I was tough. After, I realized that I was very fragile, emotionally, physically, even psychologically.”
A lot of women feel this way now, as the recession grabs us like a python and squeezes. But so do a lot of men. Couldn’t we look out for each other and find some common ground in the fight for the common good? Could gun-owners fill out a simple form with a good heart?
Here’s a spur: Think of those 14 women in their cold graves and the 20 years we’ve had that they didn’t.

From CBC: Police gun registry queries jumped last year: report

By Chris Hall, CBC News

The number of police officers using the firearms registry jumped last year, according to a report prepared by the RCMP.

Figures contained in the Mounties’ annual performance report show that the number of queries to the Canadian Firearms Registry rose 24 per cent in 2008-09.

The report also says the government spent just $8.4 million on the registry last year — a third of what had been budgeted, in part because it needed 66 fewer full-time workers than the 131 anticipated.

The information became public just a day after Liberal and New Democrat MPs from rural ridings voted with the government to scrap the long-gun registry, which covers hunting rifles and shotguns.

That bill, put forth by Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner, must now go to committee for further study. However, opponents concede there is little chance of stopping it from becoming law.

The report released today blames confusion over the future of the registry for a sharp drop in the number of firearms owners who renewed their licences. The report says 100,000 gun owners failed to renew their five-year licences despite the government’s decision to waive the fees.

Owners of rifles and shotguns still need to be licenced, even if they are no longer required to register those firearms.

Some of the information included in the annual performance report comes from the commissioner of firearms’ 2008 report, which has yet to be tabled by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan, despite Friday being the deadline.

From: CBC News, October 19, 2009, Smuggled gun used in double-homicide

A gun allegedly used in two Ottawa homicides in 2007 was smuggled hundreds of kilometres from a rural corner of Maine into Canada. The gun — a .40 calibre HiPoint semi-automatic pistol — costs less than a base-model iPod in the U.S., and was allegedly used to shoot Ziad Ahmad, 32, and Phillip Salmon, 23, at Pari’s Motel in Ottawa’s east end two years ago. Jury selection begins Monday in the trial of Kawku Frimpong, the man accused of killing Salmon and Ahmad during a botched robbery in 2007. The Crown alleges that on June 21, 2007, Frimpong and his accomplice, Phillip Salmon, burst into the motel room where Ahmad and another man were smoking crack. Frimpong and Salmon’s intent, according to the Crown, was to rob the men. The Crown alleges that Frimpong fired a shot, and the single bullet killed both Ahmad — who was hit in the head — and Salmon, who was hit in the chest. Police found Salmon’s body in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut restaurant next door to the motel at around 10 p.m. that night. Ahmad’s body was found in the motel shortly after. Police located the gun a few days later — it was discarded at a construction site at the Montfort hospital near the motel. Police used the gun’s serial number to trace it to the Maine Military Supply store in Brewer, Maine where it was sold on June 13, 2006. Lawrence Sears, a 63-year-old with no criminal record, had purchased the gun, and seven other HiPoint pistols, the same day. Sears was what police call a “straw purchaser” — a front man who buys guns for a smuggler. The smuggler then took the weapons across the U.S. border. “I thought I’d get lots of money,” Sears said. “I ended up getting screwed. But I had a gambling habit at the time and that’s how I spent the money. I spent it all gambling.” In this case, the smuggler was Andrew Porter, a 39-year-old New Brunswick resident and property manager with an addiction to video slot machines. Porter smuggled the guns into New Brunswick, and from there they were sold to people in cities across Ontario and Quebec — many of whom were barred from buying guns on both sides of the border. Police believe that the gun involved in the Pari’s Motel murders came through Montreal, and was likely sold more than once before being used in the crime. Sears and Porter are currently serving sentences for trafficking guns; Sears is in federal prison in Massachusetts, and Porter in Youngstown, Ohio. Porter’s lawyer, Jeffrey Silverstein, said his client knows about the murders. “He was sickened to hear about that,” he said. “When an individual is clouded by an addiction, they’re not thinking straight. He didn’t — should have — but didn’t stop to think how these guns might have been used.” Police estimate that 30 other HiPoints Porter sold are in circulation in Canada.

Gun Violence in the News: CBC News, June 15, 2009, “Growing gun and gang problems plaguing Winnipeg, say police”

A weekend of violence in Winnipeg’s North End is an indication of a growing gun problem in the city, according to police Chief Keith McCaskill.

Wayne Roger Michelle was shot to death in the 500 block of Manitoba Avenue on Saturday night. It was just one of many violent acts that occurred in the city over the weekend. In less than 24 hours, four men were shot and five people were seriously assaulted. ‘And not only is it difficult for our officers, but it’s difficult for the public that are in the neighbourhoods to have any sense of real safety any longer.’—Mike Sutherland, Winnipeg Police Association.

One of the shootings was a drive-by that targeted a house on Redwood Avenue, and officers reported responding to at least a dozen other suspected shootings. “This is pretty much off the charts in terms of the number of violent firearms-related offences that have occurred over the course of the weekend,” said Mike Sutherland, president of the Winnipeg Police Association. “And not only is it difficult for our officers, but it’s difficult for the public that are in the neighbourhoods to have any sense of real safety any longer because you just never know when the bullets are going to start flying.”

The high numbers of gun calls police rushed to this weekend are part of gang retaliation in the North End, said McCaskill. He said the street crimes unit was on the ground there all weekend and were able to perform CPR on one shooting victim because they heard the gunfire themselves. Witnesses afraid to come forward According to McCaskill, who acknowledged that many people are too afraid to come forward as witnesses in the North End, police have plans to get more officers embedded in the affected communities, and that recruiting informants is one way to reduce gang violence.

The gang situation is coming to a head, said Sutherland, adding there needs to be a more organized attack on gangs in the city, or this weekend’s violence will only be the start. “At some point we’re going to need to take serious steps or this is going to become relatively commonplace, not just this weekend and not just in certain neighbourhoods within the city but in many other neighbourhoods within the city,” Sutherland said. In response to the increase of gun-related crimes, Sutherland suggested a project similar to Winnipeg’s Auto Theft Suppression Strategy. The monitoring program, launched in 2005, contacts the highest-risk auto thieves every three hours with at least one in-person visit every day. It will cost money and require buy-in frm the courts and the justice system, he said, but it would be worth it.

From CBC News: ‘This is horrific’: 5-year-old shot in Toronto

From CBC News:

Toronto Police say they will “leave no stone unturned” in their hunt for the gunman who shot a five-year-old girl on Thursday night.

The child was shot in the chest as she stood inside her home on Bellevue Crescent, near Lawrence Avenue West and Weston Road.

Someone outside fired a spray of bullets. At least one of the bullets pierced the door of the girl’s townhouse apartment and struck her in the chest.

She was rushed to Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital where doctors found the bullet had struck her lung. In spite of the seriousness of the injury the hospital says she is in stable condition.

“We’re going to leave no stone unturned until we find who has done this,” said Staff Sgt. Karen Smythe. “This is horrific.”

Police are appealing for witnesses to come forward. They also suspect others may have been injured by the bullets or from bullet fragments and are also asking those people to contact police.