Swine flu doesn't kill people; guns kill people

I know I've been neglecting this place yet again. It's been a combination of "I need to keep writing about politics for class so I want my next entry to be political" and "there's nothing interesting going on in politics".

(Dan's excuse, if you were wondering, is that his new netbook makes him blind.)

One thing I'd considered writing about was MPs' pay - every so often, you hear about how politicians could use a raise, but won't suggest it for fear of public backlash. Brantford city councillors, for example, are only classified as part-time and some need second jobs to supplement their income.

Then I decided to do some simple fact-checking - and it turns out that Canadian and Ontarian politicians are paid very well indeed. My suggestion would have been to introduce legislation tying MPs' pay to the national average - but something tells me that it'd be hard to convince even a single MP to go along with that.

So salaries were out. But then, seemingly out of the blue, another issue crept up and grabbed my attention - the gun registry.

Within the span of a few days, we went from Conservatives making noise about reopening the debate on gun control to a vote that the Toronto Star claims will "in principle kill the gun registry".

Before this issue came to the forefront, my understanding of the registry was pretty rudimentary, and limited to what the popular narrative seems to be - a great idea in principle, but ridiculously expensive to maintain and overall a failure.

As it turns out - and John Geddes over at Macleans has been doing an excellent job explaining this - police find the registry extremely useful. If they're responding to a call, it tells them if there is likely to be a gun involved.

It might not be stopping the flow of illegal guns. It might not be stopping gun crime dead in its tracks. But if it's helping the police do their jobs, it seems to me like it must be doing something right.

And it's not like registering your gun means you're not allowed to use it - even the most ardent supporters of firearms would admit that they can be used to kill people, and so why not maybe let the government know you have a gun in case it ever falls into the wrong hands?

More to come later. Stuff that's a little more fun.

--Ryan