SCHOOL PROGRAM: GUN-CONFISCATION IN DISGUISE

SCHOOL PROGRAM: GUN-CONFISCATION IN DISGUISE

by Jane Gaffin

WHITEHORSE, Yukonslavia -- The Liberals, who can't be relied on to predict accurate weather information 24 hours in advance, are embarking in the horrorscope business of predicting what crimes people are destined to commit in the future.

Specifically, they think kids are killers.

Two educators were recently interviewed on CBC radio about the merits of a new Yukon education program. Teachers, school counsellors, police officers and others of the law system will participate.

The predictive, preventive, pro-active initiative is supposed to weed out students who march to the beat of a different drummer.

Exactly who is qualified to make the determination of who is a "threat to public safety" and "a high risk to offend" is an unknown, unless these educators have a pipeline to the Almighty.

But the program will undoubtedly tug at public and parental heartstrings and garner approval. "Whatever is necessary to be safe," people will chant, robotically.

The program is ostensibly designed to prevent another school shooting like occurred at Colorado's Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and the copycat shooting eight days later at the W.R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta.

This model, based on recommendations flowing from the Governor's Columbine Review Commission, may be well-intentioned but is open to abuse. It employs the Orwellian-style approach. Students will be encouraged to tattle on other students as well as on their own parents.

There are five common denominators in both school incidents cited: the assailants were victims of bullying; they found solace in computers; were ingesting prescribed drugs for depression or hyper-activity; had discussed their plans with others beforehand and nobody reported it; and had obtained the guns from their own homes.

But "zero-tolerance" programs of this ilk obviously reach far beyond the pretended goal of simply keeping violence and guns out of schools.

This community has already witnessed the damage that paranoid bureaucrats can do when arbitrarily targeting an exemplary citizen as "a threat to society".

The accusers, for some inexplicable reason, are always right; they always have the upper hand. Yet they don't have degrees or licenses to practice psychiatry nor are they analyzed for their own mental stability, character and motives.

Their assessments of "emotional unstable" and "madman" stick and are willingly swallowed by the police, leaving the accused only with denial as an ineffectual defense and a $100,000 in legal fees. Any person who doesn't fit the textbook description of correct social behaviour is a sinner of the first order who must be punished.

This Liberal social re-engineering scheme parallels the tactics of Josef Stalin. The paranoid Communist Leader eliminated millions by instructing his secret police to hunt down and charge his enemies as "crazy". Then the court would levy verdicts of death by firing squad.

As an example of how self-proclaimed bureaucratic self-importance can inflict hate and hurt, an innocent local resident was banned from the federal library located in Red Square.

He looked like any other field person who frequented the facilities. But the librarians didn't like his looks and clothes and were ready to pull out the pepper spray. They were convinced the "stranger" had a bomb or a gun.

After he left, these babes checked Websites they thought the computer whiz had visited. He was actually researching land as pertained to protected areas.

But they accused the man of having accessed "a weird science fiction" site. It was inappropriate use of their library, they declared, while employees were behind Red Square cubicles shopping on-line, playing card games and downloading child pornography.

What the librarians actually found was a Website opened by a previous user to the "Christian Science Monitor", an age-old Boston-based daily newspaper.

Nothing could convince the accusers they were wrong. One librarian was spitting she was so adamant about defending her judgment. To prove their right to be nervous, the jittery babes had a bank of security buzzers installed due to "problem patrons" and also banned the patron who liked reading the "Monitor".

This type bureaucratic overkill is scary. Yet the heavy-handed national police force uses these fairy tales to obtain search warrants to raid homes, seize guns and lay whatever trumped-up criminal charges suits them.

Their objective has consistently been to remove guns from the hands of private ownership; now it's based on the pretense of preventing another school shooting.

If grown men have difficulty protecting themselves against such unjust bureaucratic witch hunts, what possible chance have innocent youths who are wrongly crucified by the state?

Advancing a crystal-ball method of identification will hardly prevent a school shooting. In fact, the program will likely backfire and trigger one.

It can plant the idea into the scrambled minds of kids who are taking prescribed or illegal drugs. Those who have reached the age of rebellion will do exactly the opposite of what they think the authorities don't want them to do.

The Liberals hope the reverse psychology works. Eco-Nazi organizations are waiting in the wings to choreograph another Columbine.

Lately, the gun advocates have been gaining too much urban support since the box-cutter wielding terrorists attacked America a year ago. Anti-gun groups in Canada need another Montreal Massacre to regain lost ground. Then the socialists can easily turn up the heat on politicians to toughen what is already a Draconian firearms law.

Twitchy soothsayers will start branding youths as "bullies" for engaging in steam-release "dustings" in the school yard. They'll be expelled from school or sent off for psychiatric evaluation or a stay in a mental ward. Parents will be forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation and/or treatment as well.

Any of these so-called preventative actions can trigger a shooting.

Meanwhile, the police will be scanning the FIPS, FAPS and FARTS registries for any sign of guns in the household where the marked student resides.

The police will contact extended members of the family, friends and neighbours of the marked student as well as his chums.

All are guilty by association, even if they are not gun owners. If the "associates" are gun owners, the police will seize their property, too.

One way or the other, the guns are going to be ultimately sacrificed to the cops. So why would anybody subject him/herself to the aggravation of paperwork and donate stiff registration fees by January 1, 2003 for naught?

What better excuse for confiscation then for the police to link gun owners with youths the state has predicted to be at "high-risk to offend"--and the child may be yours! Or a child of a friend living next door or two hundred miles away.

But nobody can object to the government wanting to remove temptation from the hands of a potential killer, can they? That's a hard one to rebuff.

Still, the police's campaign to cleanse Yukonslavia, or the whole of Kanuckistan, of guns is about as effective as spitting into a willawaw.

Anybody bent on having guns and can't latch onto them legally, will acquire them from the black market. If all else fails, they can construct their own. The instructions are on the Internet and in the school library's encyclopedias.

That fact should give more fuel to the resolve of Minister of Industry Canada, Alan Rock, who brought us Bill C-68. He is already on a rampage to regulate the Internet with an iron fist like the Chinese government that drove its Internet underground.

Next, the Liberals will called in MP Hedy Fry to burn the school reference books like Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler did.

Under Section 55 of the firearms act, police are authorized to question anybody about a gun owners who is accused of "suspicious" behaviour or whose "suspicious" registration form was red-flagged in the computer.

The gun owner's license will be suspended and the guns confiscated if the snoop troopers happen to interview a complainant who feels the gun owner is "a threat to society".

There are no provisions for the accused--gun owners or not--to defend him/herself against nasty, treacherous, bitter, vindictive, mean-spirited individuals or the muscle-flexing bureaucratic bullies who have too much discretionary power.

While the accusers are protected with total impunity, the democratic rights of innocent Canadians are violated.

So, that leaves the gun owner in a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" dilemma. People will have to follow their good conscience as to whether they apply to register and/or re-register all their guns or not.

The personal risk factor of getting caught breaking an unpalatable law and paying the consequences will have to be weighed against old-fashioned Magna Carta principles.

Registration can be handy, though. It's easier to confiscate your property when the police know where you live and what you own.

Regardless of what you and your associates do about registration, the police are going to find out whether you own guns by interrogating the kids at school.

The police are banking on the probability that most parents taught their offspring not to lie, notwithstanding that the government has made liars out of us all.

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