Where have you been, lo these many years?

The way Paul Martin talks, you'd think that gun violence was a new phenomenon and that he was moving quickly to quell it before it got out of hand.

Newsflash, Mr. Prime Minister -- gun violence in Toronto is entrenched in the culture -- why? Because for years, the Liberal governments who might have done something to prevent its escalation, ignored it.

There is more to gun violence than guns. It's that simple. People who don't value human life, or who believe their needs trump the rights of another person to live -- these people will continue to exist and kill regardless of whether they can get a hand gun to do it. Does Mr. Martin think the criminals are going to come in and hand over their guns any faster than they 'registered' them?

The breakdown of families and core family values are far more important detering violence than banning a gun will ever be. Lynda Hurst wrote about this in the Toronto Star on the weekend and it's worth the read.

Today Martin announced tougher sentencing, great, but where have they been the past twelve years? If they were really serious, this would have been a preventive measure, rather than an attempt to stem the flow of blood on Toronto's streets. Besides, the Tories have already promised tougher sentences and given the track record of the Liberals, it's the Conservatives I would trust to follow through.

The Liberal Party is the party of the 'Faint Hope Clause', and the ineffective Young Offenders Act (since replaced by the Youth Criminal Justice Act -- also ineffective.) Their stance on crime seems to have been 'if we ignore it, maybe it will go away' and now suddenly, after playing ignorant for all this time -- they come riding into town, platitudes ablazin' and they're going to get tough on crime --as though it's someone else's fault that things have become this bad.

Maybe it's because so few Liberals live in the real world. They are beyond street crime, because their lives never meet the street. Their experience with our daily reality, ends when they close the newspaper. They don't fear drive by shootings or stray bullets in school yards. They don't fear letting their kids walk places, or travel alone because of perverts. They don't fear walking home from a bus stop after dark -- they will never be in circumstances where these kinds of things are issues.

Take away all the handguns. Drop them in the ocean. Is Toronto going to be any safer?

Gun violence is only one of the many life-destroying crimes that plague this country. What makes a society safe is the knowledge that our governing members refuse to accept certain behaviours. As a society, we have to show our intolerance for child molesters, murderers and other villains by locking them up and throwing away the key. A Liberal government will never do that.

Successive Liberal governments have shown their empathy lies with criminals, rather than victims. Whatever solutions they propose to combat crime are irrelevant -- because they are part of the problem.

canadianna