David Climenhaga's Desperation is the Anti-gun Lobby's Desperation

Desperation.


That's literally the only explanation for a recent blogpost by far-left demagogue David Climenhaga. It appears both on Climenhaga's Alberta Diary blog and on Rabble.ca.


The latter is a dead giveaway into the true nature of the post. When writing for Rabble.ca not only is basis in fact or sound logic not a prerequisite, it frequently seems like it's discouraged.


It's not surprising: this particular blogpost very clearly has no basis in either of these things. It's merely an exercise in desperation, and a tacit admission that the debate over the long gun registry isn't about the long registry at all -- not for the left.


Rather, they want to make it about everything but the long gun registry.


In Climenhaga's case, he wants to make it about the shooting rampage perpetrated by Derek Jensen, killing three and wounding one other.


It's only natural Climenhaga would want to draw the conclusion; the story has everything that LGR proponents favour. It's tragic. It's sensational. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the long gun registry, but that doesn't matter. Climenhaga practically practically says as much himself, without ever realizing it.


Derek Jensen opened fire on a car carrying the four victims, one of whom was his ex-girlfriend, not with a long gun, but with a handgun... the kind of weapon that will be entirely unaffected by the legislation that is about to formally abolish the long gun registry.


But to Climenhaga, none of this matters. Not a whit.


Rather, Climenhaga forecasts that the Harper government will also move to abolish the handgun registry... even though no one has even flirted with such an idea. If he bothered to attempt a search for remarks by Conservative MPs talking about abolishing the handgun registry, he very clearly came up empty; his blogpost features not a single one.


Simply put, Climenhaga is openly spreading panic about something he's concocted entirely out of his own imagination.


But in his desperate bid to try to make the long-gun registry about more than just the LGR, he's unwittingly played a dastardly trick on himself: he's just written every pro-gun rights activist in Canada a license to make the LGR about more than just the registration of long guns... about things such as mass gun seizure.


Pro-LGR activists have insisted that mass gun seizure has never been on their agenda. We've been expected to take them at their word.


Ironically, there's a great deal more justification for being concerned about mass gun seizures -- stories abound about Toronto Police, in particular, seizing long guns mere hours after owners have mistakenly allowed the registration to expire.


Meanwhile, with no evidence whatsoever to justify the prediction, Climenhaga infers that abolition of the handgun registry is next.


The only trace of evidence Climenhaga offers is a remark about wedge politics, suggesting that the handgun registry is the next, ideal, wedge issue for the Conservatives.


It's beyond comical. It ignores the fact that it's been the Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois who have been exploiting the LGR as their wedge issue. It also ignores the fact that one of the priorities of the Conservative government has been gun crime. Not gun ownership, but gun crime.


Of course that the facts so neatly lineup against his handgun registry strawman argument is a detail that seems to have evaded Climenhaga in his desperate frenzy to erect a strawman that will distract from now the facts also so neatly lineup against the long gun registry.


In the end, there are only two things about David Climenhaga's blogpost that are remarkable: the first is the extent of its self-edification. The second is the desperation.


But mostly the desperation.