“The (long-gun) registry targets the wrong people and it’s not effective,” Michel Therrien, a hunting guide who co-founded the group, said in an interview. He said there’s no proof registering firearms prevents crime.
“We’re saying let’s instead put the money where it would help” — mental-health services and targeting the black market for guns, Therrien said.
He said the registry stigmatizes hunters, adding many urban dwellers have misconceptions about hunting.
“If you grew up in the Gaspésie or Abitibi, people have farms, they hunt, they go out into the forest, it’s passed down from generation to generation,” he said. “For us, guns are used for a very precise purpose: hunting.”
In response to the protest, gun control activists, including victims of the École Polytechnique and Dawson College shootings and their families, insisted Quebec’s long-gun registry will save lives and prevent crimes.
Quebec passed a law creating the registry in 2016, giving owners until Jan. 29, 2019 to register firearms or face penalties of up to $5,000.
As of mid-January, owners had registered less than one-quarter of the 1.6 million guns the government estimates are owned by Quebecers. So far, the Coalition Avenir Québec government has said it will encourage compliance via information campaigns rather than fines.
As he stood in the crowd in Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, gun owner Hugues Vaillancourt noted that in the Quebec City mosque massacre and the Dawson shooting, the killers used registered weapons.
“The registry would have changed nothing,” said Vaillancourt, a hunter who lives in Disraeli in the Chaudière-Appalaches region. “You have to get to these individuals before they commit the crimes.”
Ken Taylor, a hunting guide from Waskaganish in northern Quebec, said the registry creates unnecessary bureaucracy and he expects the cost of the system to balloon.
Taylor, who said he worries requiring extra paperwork will discourage hunting, noted owners of long guns must have a possession and acquisition licence — a process that involves background checks.
Police can use that information to determine whether someone may have a gun, he said. “We’ve been checked, we’re not bad people, we’re not criminals, we don’t have mental problems, we’re not fanatics,” Taylor said.
But gun-control advocates say the registry will provide detailed information that could be crucial in dangerous situations........