Cdn-Firearms Digest Sunday, May 16 2010 Volume 13 : Number 866 In this issue: Re: Expense audits and Registry records Prisons and abattoirs Re: W5 investigates: When the RCMP pulls the trigger - CTV News CTV - Critics call Alberta's body armour crackdown toothless Focus by police on 'bad guys with guns' coincides with ... TORONTO STAR LETTER: No money received from NRA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 00:27:18 -0400 From: Lee Jasper Subject: Re: Expense audits and Registry records Some one said: > Hey Lee we all know how much you hate Harper, but in this matter all the > parties except the Bloc wanted nothing to do with it and I think the Bloc > knew it and took political advantage of it. Jack and Iffiy both like the > perks without the scrutiny. All poloticians are big on the WIIFM's (whats > in it for me). I don't hate Harper; I dislike the man for the oaf he has become. So much potential and wasted talent and so into wedges which divide rather than unite. Open and Accountable was Harper's and the CPC's election plank and Brand. > If you had just held on to your income trusts they all came > back and then some. Panic selling just means someone else made the money. > I lost mine on Nortel, we have all gotten hammered over the years and by > every party. If your Trusts have come back, congrats. Mine will need at least another 3-4 years, which compounds the loss. We're talking about a Party and election plank promise. And, I don't recall ever being hammered in such a fashion by 'every' Party. > every retailer is required to keep a record of each gun sold and that > will not be affected by this law if it passes and any sale between > individuals will still require you to call mirimachi to confirm that the > buyer is lawfully allowed to buy the gun so the new system amounts to a > paperless registration system and that is what people are objecting to. We all know this to be the case, dealer calls NB and the CAFC calls CFOs, etc. . . . Most also know that many retailers have only kept electronic records in place of the old paper log books. What I needed was a cite indicating what the gov't has 'actually said' about this process as a replacement for the registry. There's no reference in the Bill or Hoeppner's press release. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 00:51:44 -0400 From: Lee Jasper Subject: Prisons and abattoirs > Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime > http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/809521--probing-the-link-between-slaughterhouses-and-violent-crime Has anyone considered - how many prisons have abattoirs and teach slaughtering and meat cutting? - -- -- Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime Image & Caption "Meat inspectors in a Chicago plant in 1906. Upton Sinclair's landmark novel "The Jungle" detailed the inhuman conditions in turn-of-century U.S. abattoirs. It also inspired a contemporary study of the links between slaughterhouses and rates of violent and sexual crimes in adjacent communities." Published On Fri May 14 2010 Sarah Barmak Special to the Star To author Upton Sinclair, the hellish world of factory slaughterhouses was as dangerous to human beings as it was to pigs. He filled his 1906 novel The Jungle with meat-packing images that seem ripped from a slasher movie: “... and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting — sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” Sinclair’s abattoir labourers get so desensitized to violence that rates of murder, rape and brawls among them rise. The book cemented the link between slaughterhouses and crime for decades to come — long before pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton haunted headlines. More than a hundred years later, a University of Windsor researcher may have proven the literary classic right. Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact. In a recent study, Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002. “I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says. Fitzgerald says she was inspired by The Jungle to study crime records in U.S. communities where slaughterhouses are located. She became fascinated by studies of the environmental effects of slaughterhouses that mentioned crime rates, without explanation, seemed to go up when the factories opened in communities. Fitzgerald carefully weighed the figures in order to see whether a link really existed. She found that an average-sized slaughterhouse with 175 employees would annually increase the number of arrests by 2.24 and the number of reports by 4.69. The larger the abattoir, the worse the local crime problem. She controlled for factors such as the influx of new residents when slaughterhouses open, high numbers of young men — even the number of immigrants. “Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to blame the immigrant labour pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she controlled for these factors. Nor can the violence be blamed on factory work itself. Fitzgerald compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries — dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they seemed to bring the crime rate down. “The unique thing about (abattoirs) is that (workers are) not dealing with inanimate objects, but instead dealing with live animals coming in and then killing them, and processing what’s left of them.” More studies are needed to determine if crimes were being committed by factory workers or by others in the community, she says, and how exactly that kind of work could cause crime to go up. But the numbers leave few other explanations other than the slaughterhouses being somehow to blame. It’s a case of science catching up to what has been folk knowledge since industrialized slaughterhouses began to appear in the 19th century: workers exposed to the killing of large numbers of animals on a regular basis become disturbed and appear to lose empathy. The Jungle made such anecdotal tales a mass scandal, galvanizing readers and prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to order reforms to the meat industry. Within months of publication, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were signed into law. Sinclair’s book advocated socialist ideals as an alternative to the exploitation of labour epitomized by the factory abattoirs. Buts the etiology of the problem remains something of a chicken-and-egg puzzle. Do slaughterhouses desensitize workers to killing? Or, could the work attract people who are less sensitive to begin with? Fitzgerald suggests a similarity between slaughterhouse communities and military communities, which have been studied for higher incidence rates of partner abuse. “One of (the explanations) is the violence they witness and sometimes have to participate in might result in some kind of desensitization,” she says. But the correlation was not as strong for smaller farms where animals were killed. “It seems like there’s something about the industrialization process,” says Fitzgerald. “you have people who are actually responsible for slaughtering thousands of animals a day.” Canadian slaughterhouses were left out of the report, and Fitzgerald says she wants to do a similar study here in the future. In Toronto, where abattoirs have been nestled in quiet areas such as the Junction (before it burned down in 2006) and King Street West, the violence seems hard to spot. Residents of the pretty, tree-lined Garrison Creek neighbourhood say the only time they notice Toronto Abattoirs Ltd. and Quality Meat Packers Ltd. factory at the bottom of Tecumseth St. is on warmer days, when a putrid scent wafts over the patios and the nearby baseball field. “On good days it’s like a farm,” says Antonio Ferreira, a 15-year resident of a red-brick highrise at King St. W. and Niagara St. “On a bad day it’s like a rotting carcass.” He couldn’t recall any violent incidents at or near the abattoir, however. Workers trickling out of Toronto Abattoirs’ revolving turnstile simply said that they liked working there “fine,” but wouldn’t say more about what their jobs were like. Although slaughterhouse conditions have improved immensely since Sinclair published his scathing descriptions of disease-ridden equipment and slave wages, they still exist to do one job: the methodical butchering of animals on a massive scale. And that job still requires people to do it. “There is something unique about the slaughterhouses,” says Fitzgerald. “There’s definitely a need for further research to figure out exactly what that is.” © Copyright Toronto Star ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 07:40:27 -0400 From: "mred" Subject: Re: W5 investigates: When the RCMP pulls the trigger - CTV News Saw this last night on TV. They didn't pull any punches..the mounties out and out lied and so did the civilian police watchdog ..(but we all KNEW THAT~!!)ed/on - ----- Original Message ----- From: "David R.G. Jordan" To: "Canadian Firearms Digest" Sent: Saturday, May 15, 2010 5:02 PM Subject: W5 investigates: When the RCMP pulls the trigger - CTV News > Cc: "C.L.A.S.S." > > W5 investigates: When the RCMP pulls the trigger > http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091030/w5_beyondjustice_091031/20091031?hub=WFive > > *This is mostly for folk's that are lucky enough to have a hi-speed > broadband connection, on account of all the JavaScript video content > segments of the entire show, that are on the website. > > Saying that, they still do provide a short, written, skeleton synopsis > of what all the video content contains of which I'll have included here. > And you may(?) just be able to watch the video content, as long as you > keep the Java applet window in it's small viewer. There is no harm in > trying to watch these segments on a slow modem, but there is no > guarantee, unfortunately. > > -DRGJ > > -- -- > > W5 investigates: When the RCMP pulls the trigger - CTV News > Saturday, May 15, 2010 > > W5 Staff > Date: Sat. Oct. 31 2009 7:00 PM ET > > Ian Bush. Kevin St Arnaud. Robert Dziekanski. > > Three men dead. All killed by RCMP officers in British Columbia. And all > RCMP constables involved in their deaths cleared -- without any criminal > charges. > > Internal RCMP investigation reports obtained by W5 show that in all these > cases the B.C. Attorney General's ministry had evidence that contradicted > statements of the Mounties involved, yet chose not to prosecute them. > Those decisions made by the B.C. Criminal Justice Branch have left the > families of the victims wondering if the RCMP is beyond justice. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 8:51 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: CTV - Critics call Alberta's body armour crackdown toothless CTV EDMONTON MAY 15, 2010 Critics call Alberta's body armour crackdown toothless The Canadian Press - Updated: Sat May. 15 2010 08:11:36 http://edmonton.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100515/Body-armour-100515/20100515/?hub=EdmontonHome EDMONTON - An impending Alberta law cracking down on body armour will be a toothless paper tiger when it goes hunting in the Internet jungle, predicts one distributor. Gordon McGowan says it's pointless to regulate armour over the counter in the province when it's just a mouse-click away through a backroom middleman in the United States. "In 10 minutes I'm going to find (online) someone sitting at their kitchen table who will order it, get it to their address in Armpit, Montana, box it up and ship it to me," said McGowan, president of MilArm, a rearmament distributor in downtown Edmonton. "It goes on all the time, and to believe otherwise is just utter foolishness." Bill 12, Alberta's Body Armour Control Act, passed three readings swiftly in the legislature this spring and officials are now writing the rules and regulations that will underpin the law. "They're developing the regulations and we're hoping to have them done by fall," said Justice Department spokesman Jay O'Neill, who added the plan is to have the bill proclaimed at that time. Alberta is not alone. Similar legislation has passed in British Columbia and has been introduced in Manitoba. Politically, it has created a wedge issue for the surging Wildrose Alliance in its battle with Premier Ed Stelmach's Conservatives for the hearts and minds of centre-right voters heading into an expected 2012 election. The bill has been endorsed by the RCMP and by police chiefs in Edmonton and Calgary as one more hammer they can use to smack thugs. It was brought in because police were finding that more and more gang members were wearing weapon-proof vests while peddling drugs or targeting each other in drive-by shootings. Calgary legislature member Jonathan Denis told the legislature that things have become so brazen in his city that gangs "wear this body armour almost as a way of taunting other people, almost as a way of status." The law will force people who want to buy body armour to apply for a permit from the government. Those not deemed fit, -- anyone with a criminal record, for instance -- may be refused. Applicants must give detailed reasons why they want the armour, must undergo a criminal record check, hand over information otherwise considered legally private and pay a fee. Those who put themselves at risk to keep public and property safe -- such as police officers, ambulance attendants, firefighters and wildlife officers -- are exempt, as are those who possess a firearms permit. The armour permits will have to be presented if a peace officer asks for them. If need be, an officer will have the right to search the person without a warrant. The maximum penalty will be a $10,000 fine and/or six months in jail. Justice Minister Alison Redford said the government believes it has balanced the rights of the individual with public safety. "We don't do it off the cuff. We don't do it randomly. But we aren't going to step back from helping the police from protecting the community because the community wants to be protected," she said in an interview. Could the law intrude too much on individual rights and lose in a court challenge? Perhaps, said Redford. "There's always the risk that that might happen because, as legislators, one of our jobs is to represent the values of the community that elected us." Paul Hinman and the two other Wildrose legislature members derided the bill during debate this spring as a big-ticket ball of public relations fluff designed to make the government appear hard on crime. Hinman says the Wildrose, too, take a hard line on law and order issues, but any initiative has to be balanced with cost and infringements on personal freedom. "I just don't see the upside to it." Taxpayers "spent a billion dollars on the (federal) gun registry. Was that cost effective? No. It was the biggest waste of law enforcement money." He said the way to deter criminals from using body armour is to deliver harsher sentences when a crime is committed while wearing it. That solution is too simplistic, countered Redford, especially when dealing with the glacial pace of lawmaking in the nation's capital. "We have looked at where we have constitutional authority to do things, because one of our frustrations has been that once we put something on the national agenda to be dealt with through the Criminal Code, it can languish for years." Bill sparks rancorous debate Debate in the legislature on the bill was short, rancorous, blindly partisan, and at times bizarre. The Opposition Alberta Liberals didn't object on the grounds that if the rules would help the police, then they were OK with it. Rob Anderson of the Alliance, however, wondered aloud why a government keen to regulate should stop at body armour. "Do we need to bring in a knife registry?" he asked. "Perhaps a big rock registry or ... a steel-toed boots registry? "You're taking a sledgehammer to this when all you need is a fly swatter." Back at MilArm, McGowan said the registry will duplicate the due diligence his staffers already employ when they sell ballistic and stab vests. He said a lot of his business is with bar bouncers, who are becoming more focused on prevention rather than taking unruly patrons out back for a beating. He worries the new rules will discourage them from signing up for the armour. And, he said, if they won't come to him, they can go somewhere else. "There are one or two (sellers) out of 100 that are indiscriminately selling body armour to anybody who wants to buy," he said. "Putting all the rules in place isn't going to change that." ------------------------------ Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 8:56 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: Focus by police on 'bad guys with guns' coincides with ... ... big drop in Baltimore's violent crime www.latimes.com - MAY 15, 2010 Focus by police on 'bad guys with guns' coincides with big drop in Baltimore's violent crime BY BEN NUCKOLS, Associated Press Writer http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-bad-guys-with-guns,0,423534,print.story BALTIMORE (AP) - In a blighted west Baltimore neighborhood, Lt. Ian Dombroski turns his unmarked police car around a corner and sees several men standing outside a liquor store. They scatter immediately. Dombroski knows they're probably selling drugs, but he keeps driving. Five years ago, he said, officers who happened upon a similar scene wouldn't take such a selective approach. "We'd all jump out, grab all the junkies, find out who had the drugs on 'em, lock 'em up, and that might be three or four drug arrests right there," Dombroski said. "And we'd go, 'Good, those are numbers.'" But under Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, officers in one of the nation's most violent cities are no longer being told to beef up arrest statistics. The number of arrests has declined the past two years. Yet homicides and shootings are down, too - to totals not seen since the late 1980s. Officers familiarize themselves with a list of 120 dangerous criminals and patrol where they live, talking to them and working acquaintances for tips. The serving of arrest warrants has been reprioritized to focus on people with violent backgrounds. Gun offenders are also required to register with the city, much like sex offenders do in many places. "I'm not trying to win the drug war," Bealefeld said. "I'm out to win the war on violence and deal effectively with violence." Experts and other police leaders don't see Bealefeld as an innovator, exactly, but he's notable for his focus on guns. He rejected a zero tolerance policy for minor offenses that the department followed in the early 2000s, which calls for enforcement of quality-of-life crimes to prevent more serious offenses. "I consider possessing a gun on the streets of this city, illegally, a crime of violence," Bealefeld said. Criminologists caution against assuming a correlation between policing strategies and crime statistics, which can be affected by demographics and other trends. Nonetheless, the numbers in Baltimore are encouraging. Homicides dipped from 282 in 2007 - Bealefeld took over in July of that year - - to 234 in 2008. While murders held steady in 2009, with 238 slayings, nonfatal shootings dropped from 582 in 2008 to 450 last year. And this year, with 64 slayings through May 11, the city was on pace for 178 homicides. That would be the lowest total since 1977. The department also arrested 4,000 fewer people in 2009 than it did in 2008. Last year's arrest total was down by nearly 20,000 from 2002, when the city was at the height of the zero tolerance strategy. A grim reality remains: In a city of about 636,000 people, the murder rate per 100,000 residents last year was 37.4, meaning the home of crime dramas "Homicide" and "The Wire" remains one of the nation's deadliest cities. David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, places Bealefeld among a handful of police chiefs willing to acknowledge that the strategies their departments used for decades were ineffective, even counterproductive. He's confident that the big drops under Bealefeld are no coincidence. It's common sense, Kennedy said, to focus on a small number of dangerous people instead of rounding up people for "low-level nonsense." A specialized unit in Baltimore takes the lead in building cases against the "bad guys with guns," as Bealefield calls them. Officers in the Violent Crimes Impact Section carry lists of violent repeat offenders - people with gun arrests or convictions in their backgrounds. About 120 are on the list, and many know it, said Col. Dean Palmere, who oversees VCIS. That's intentional - if criminals know police want to catch them with a gun, they're less likely to carry one. Officers try to talk to the people on the list when they see them, but that rarely leads to an arrest. Instead, officers work informants and friends. Dombroski, a VCIS platoon leader, cites a recent case in which a repeat offender was caught with three guns in his house. The break came when police arrested a friend on a drug charge, and she tipped off officers to the home where the guns were found. Witnesses to homicides or shootings are asked about known violent offenders, and if police can peg a criminal charge on a witness, all the better. Baltimore residents aren't known for volunteering information to police, but that changes if you "catch 'em dirty," as Dombroski says. Witnesses who cooperate can see the charges against them dropped or their punishment reduced. The department has also prioritized how it serves the city's more than 42,000 open arrest warrants. Someone with a violent background gets pushed to the top of the list, even if he's wanted for a nonviolent offense such as failing to appear in court, meaning the warrant can be served months earlier. In 2008, Baltimore became the second city, after New York, to create a gun offender registry that functions much like a sex offender registry. Gun offenders must register their addresses after being released, and officers do frequent home checks. About 370 people are on the registry, and since it began, only 3 percent of registrants have been arrested for new gun crimes. The drop in shootings means city prosecutors are getting fewer gun cases, but also better ones. Prosecutors dropped charges in 25 percent of felony gun possession and nonfatal shooting cases last year, down from 40 percent the year before, according to the State's Attorney's Office. Bealefeld says these efforts have contributed to a long-overdue reduction in crime. While violent crime has dropped throughout urban America since the early 1990s, Baltimore was slow to share in that success. That's in part because it's had what Kennedy calls "a series of, for the most part, relatively foolish criminal justice strategies," including the zero-tolerance policy. Some residents of the city's poorest neighborhoods say they've noticed a difference since Bealefeld took over. Linda Moyd has lived for the past decade in Gilmor Homes, a notorious, sprawling housing project on the city's west side. She said she feels much safer than 10 years ago, even though she recently called 911 to report a stabbing outside her home. "It was a mess when I first came," Moyd said. "It was like they thought it was legal to shoot guns." ___ On the Net: Baltimore Police Department: http://www.baltimorepolice.org ------------------------------ Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 9:00 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: TORONTO STAR LETTER: No money received from NRA TORONTO STAR - MAY 16, 2010 No money received from NRA Re: U.S. gun lobby brings hardline tactics to Canada, Column, May 13 http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/809896--no-money-received-from-nra The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is listed in Bob Hepburn's column as part of the "NRA-backed gun groups." Not sure where Hepburn gets his info, but a quick call to the CTF would have cleared up that we are in fact not receiving money from the NRA. We are funded by our 74,000 Canadian supporters nationwide, many of whom have seen billions of their tax dollars wasted on a long-gun registry that ensures duck hunters and farmers are tied with needless red tape, while murderers and criminals shockingly continue to refuse to register their weapons. The NRA might be "cheering us on," but we've had no contact, no coaching, nor any money from them. However, we'd gladly cash their cheque if they want to send one our way. Kevin Gaudet, Federal and Ontario Director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Toronto http://www.taxpayer.com/ ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V13 #866 *********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca Moderator's email: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca FAQ list: http://www.canfirearms/Skeeter/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://www.canfirearms.ca CFDigest Archives: http://www.canfirearms.ca/archives To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next four lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".)