Swapping Cameras For Guns – A Public Relations Farce

Canadian Shooting Sports Association
Canadian Shooting Sports Association

Canada – -(Ammoland.com)- “Pixels for Pistols” programs should be renamed “Pixels for Paranoia.”

Swapping guns for cameras is nothing more than a tawdry public relations circus. Each transaction should be punctuated by a rim shot and cymbal crash. That’s entertainment, baby.

The recent essay by Joseph Quesnel of Frontier Centre for Public Policy in the Winnipeg Sun provides good insight on why the police programs are a waste of time.

These programs smack of liberal hand-wringing where public relations is tarted up in the guise of public safety. Criminals whose guns are the tools of their trade don’t swap them for a cameras to take grab shots of their kid’s birthday party. Quesnel astutely notes that these programs are akin to the long-gun registry — both pretend to keep John and Jane Citizen safe, but they do nothing of the kind.

The police services that sponsor the ruse are at the root of the deception. Perhaps they take some small comfort in unearthing that wartime Luger from Grandpa’s dresser drawer, but was it ever a threat to the public? The police call it “getting weapons off the street.” Wow. Meanwhile, we’ve all read the media accounts of recalcitrant police officers running afoul of the law by keeping recovered firearms for their personal use. As Quesnel points out, if people have guns and don’t want them, there are lots of collectors interested in history who are glad to have them. Working firearms could even find their way to a shooting range, horror of horrors.

Consider the gun collector who had a box full of partial pistol frames that were missing their slides and other essential parts. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away because even broken guns have an esthetic beauty in the eyes of the collector. When he heard of a local “Pixels for Pistols” program, he did the only thing a red-blooded sport shooter could do. He traded the box of pistol frame for a sheaf of camera vouchers, sold them at a deep discount, and spent the cash on a couple of new state-of-the-art pistols. Brilliant. This is not urban legend. Henry’s and Panasonic are using the anti-gun program as an advertising platform to appear community-minded. Maybe they should donate the money to the local food bank for a photo-op, lest sport shooters shop elsewhere for their electronic goodies.

The Pixels for Pistols programs are laughable, and anyone who derives solace from them is misinformed and too easily misled by their political masters. Is this a group to which a free society should be catering?

About:
The CSSA is the voice of the sport shooter and firearms enthusiast in Canada. Our national membership supports and promotes Canada’s firearms heritage, traditional target shooting competition, modern action shooting sports, hunting, and archery. We support and sponsor competitions and youth programs that promote these Canadian heritage activities. Website www.cdnshootingsports.org

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Buck

As was noted many years ago , There is a sucker born every minute , and I would like to add , they are not ALL in Canada , most of them are among the rest of us . Fools