Prime Minister’s Office is Apparently Full of Misinformed…
March 23, 2009 · By Greg Farries
Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters’ annual meeting last night in Mississauga, where a prize package featuring two rifles was raffled off during dinner.
The speech came just days after Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz was dropped from a controversial speaking engagement at a gun lobby dinner featuring a Beretta handgun as a raffle prize.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office saw little in common between the two engagements.
“Hunters and fisherman are people who are law abiding citizens. They register their guns and … in large part act responsibly. A handgun is something that’s obviously not used for hunting. There’s a significant difference between the two,” said Dimitri Soudas.[Emphasis Mine]
Dimitri Soudas, in a pathetic attempt to differentiate between the fund raising event Garry Breitkreuz was going to attend – where they were giving away a legal handgun – and the event the Prime Minister was attending – where they were giving away a legal long-gun – has basically given credence to the ridiculous notion that handguns are somehow bad because they’re not used to hunt.
Lorrie Goldstein quotes an different PMO spokesman making the same mistake:
But it was alarming and disappointing to hear Harper spokesman Kory Teneycke prissily disassociating the Conservatives from the CSSA event, telling The Canadian Press “our government obviously doesn’t endorse the raffle.” He added Breitkreuz didn’t know about it when he agreed to be the featured speaker.
Right. Back in the real world, why the CSSA should have been clairvoyant enough to know that the fact it planned to legally raffle off a handgun to law-abiding people legally entitled to own one required pre-clearance from the prime minister’s office, let alone Breitkreuz, remains a mystery.
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Indeed, the PMO’s politically correct, pap-spouting response on this particular non-issue was especially hypocritical given the Conservatives’ long-standing and sensible opposition to both the ineffective federal long-gun registry and various meaningless handgun bans proposed by the opposition.
With most of the Conservative MP’s taking their marching orders directly from the PMO, it’s no wonder we’ve seen ZERO action from the Conservative Party on shutting down the long-gun register, or removal of the draconian and ineffective restrictions on legal hand guns in Canada.
Of course, these idiots don’t stop to realize that the only reason handguns CAN’T be used for hunting in Canada is because weasel politicians prohibited it; handguns have been used to hunt every game animal on the planet, from squirrels to elephants.