Thursday, September 06, 2012

Quebec shooter has 21 "registered" firearms. How did the Crown know this?

"Prosecuting lawyers said that police seized five weapons at the scene and 17 others at Bain's home. Every one of the weapons — 21 of 22 — were registered, the Crown said."

If the long gun registry has been shut down and the data no longer accessible, how did the Crown or the police find out that 21 of these guns were registered? ( The data still exists as there currently is a court case in Quebec challenging the governments right to destroy the data, BUT this data is no longer accessible.)


Possible scenarios:
All 21 were restricted and that data is still available. (This is possible but unlikely that all 21 would be restricted, including the AK 47 knockoff (not restricted) we have all seen in the photos)

When they raided his residence, they found all the registry paper work on the guns.(Also possible.)

Someone has saved the (old and outdated) data are continue to access it!  < this is disturbing on a couple of levels not of which is the legality of keeping private data that was protected under privacy law amongst other legislation.



It is too early yet to know how it was known that the shooter was the registered owner of 21 firearms, but if it turns out that some local police or other government agency has indeed kept this data and created their own data base, I suspect this is going to to give those worried about the registry being restored at sometime in the future a great deal of evidence to justify those concerns. Not to mention the legal liability to those who are in possession of private data they are NOT entitled to posses.


7 comments:

Jim Pook said...

This is very interesting.

I am informed by those "in the know" that ALL the long-gun registry data is still in existence. None of it has been destroyed yet. It is not supposed to be accessible by police.

They are still waiting to settle the Quebec lawsuit regarding the LGR before any data is erased.

One of my big fears is that there are hundreds of copies of the LGR data all over the country. One problem is that C19 did not include any penalties for possession of data after it was supposed to be destroyed. The way the RCMP and the CFO's have been dragging their feet, I would not put it past them to have a copy or 500 squirreled away for a rainy day - or whenever the Liberals or some other leftist government comes to power.

C19 was poorly written and Toews has not dropped the hammer on the people who are resisting implimentation of the law. People need to be fired - and soon!

Ardvark said...

Wouldn't the LGR data be protected under Federal privacy legislation? I don't know for sure but everything else they collect is.

robins111 said...

The information destruction will begin in the first week of October this year, there was an article in the Trawna Star re this last week. The firearms community is assisting in the destruction by actively doing a project called the great Canadian Gun Shuffle, which entails trading, selling, loaning or giving away long guns. As we are no longer required to ask " by your leave" it isn't recorded, and strangely we forget who we deal with almost immediately. In regards to the shooter, I suspect they ask the minister for access, ( why I don't know) to the out of date files. Quebec still is trying to operate a long gun registry, but its essentially voluntary as there's no law requiring this.

Anonymous said...

i wouldn't be surprised if the conservative voters registry has all the long gun registry attached
all i am saying is any list that is a list
is bought and sold and raided and out there somewhere
it will never be undone
mike

Anonymous said...

The injunction that Quebec secured effectively nullifies all of C-19, effectively allowing them to operate the Federal non-restricted firearms registry database in Quebec, or at least, that's what I understand.

The injunction is here: http://www.jugements.qc.ca/php/decision.php?liste=62974089&doc=1239245A0D90D3CBC2D8F348BFABC16AB7BCF1FA911B87BF997A48B2B8AAEE56&page=8.

I haven't read the subsequent decisions, but I imagine they're just pro-forma extensions of the original injunction.

As near as I can understand, and while my French is good enough for government work, I had to read it in translation just to save myself the headache.

So, as far as Quebec is concerned, it's like C-19 never happened, at least until further notice.

At least for the moment, this is a non-issue.

Ardvark said...

And there you go.

I guess this means that someone is still 'manning the phones' in Miramichi.



Anonymous said...

ummmm... good to see how much good this list did to save the life of the unfortunate guy just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time doing his job...probably didn't even want to be at work while everyone else was having a victory party