Corner Brook -
Jamie Penton is happy Canada's long gun registry is going to be scrapped.
The vice-president of the Bay of Islands Rod and Gun Club said the firearms registry cost $2 billion and didn't accomplish what it was supposed to - make Canadians safer from gun violence.
Wednesday night Parliament voted 164-137 in favour of Bill C-391, Conservative backbencher Candice Hoeppner's private member's bill to scrap the registry.
Penton's pleased with the vote.
"Bigtime, actually," he said.
He believes closing the registry will make it a lot easier to get people interested in hunting and shooting as sports.
"You're going to get more people involved now because a lot of times the gun registry had pushed people away," Penton said. "Why does the government need to know every single little firearm that I've got? What did they have against me?'
"Right off the bat they're almost putting everyone out there as a criminal, and that's the way the hunters and gun owners felt. They felt as though they were pointed out as criminals when they were probably the most law-abiding citizens out there."
He said waiting up to a month and a half for the proper registration of the firearm was a real roadblock for some people, but it didn't make the public any more safe.
"What they initially said the gun registry was going to do was it was going to take all the bad guns off the streets," he said. "It basically did nothing to take the bad guns off the street.
"The only thing it did was punish the gun collectors and hunters out there. We (rod and gun club) were against it. We certainly weren't in favour of a gun registry."
Penton said the closure of the registry will make it easier to own old guns that don't have serial numbers and have obscure origins that aren't easily researched - something that had to be provided on the registration form.
With the long gun registry in its last stages, he said the effort will probably be put toward restricted weapons, such as semi-automatics, fully-automatics and hand guns.
"The issue with the guns is probably more around hand guns than any rifles or anything like that," he said. "It's a problem that's probably more prevalent in Ontario and on the mainland where you see these armed stick-up robberies and biker gangs. That's what they're trying to get a hold on. They did nothing to deflect from that. The hand guns were their main concern."
