DETERRENCE, IT SEEMS, IS A LOST WORD

Five MAC 10s, six Bren guns, 31 Sten guns - automatics every one -
plus a small truck load of handguns, many of them with silencers . . .
not one registered like Uncle Fudd's duck gun . . . and most of them
captured right here in Abbotsford.

Sort of tells you something about our conservative little town,
doesn't it? Tells you we have a rotten underbelly, and a large one at
that.

Forget chickens and milk and berries; our number-one crop is deep in
the drug trade, and we're not only exporting pot and meth, but guns
too. Very lethal guns.

A Bren gun isn't something you pack around in your jeans, or in the
glove box of your car.

This is a very big, very mean machine gun that can shred you and your
Hummer in the blink of an eye. You don't have one of these unless you
have a lot to protect or someone to kill. Same goes for the Sten or
the MAC 10.

These are real "don't mess with me" firepower and, in the hands of
don't-give-a-damn-about-anything-but-the-money drug traffickers, they
mean death.

It's so common on the Lower Mainland for someone in the drug trade to
get whacked that it doesn't even rate top billing in the news anymore.

And it's not going to go away anytime soon. Even legalizing marijuana
in Canada won't change a thing, because our big neighbour to the south
is where the market is, and keeping a control on that supply means you
have to carry a big stick.

And Abbotsford, it seems, is where you can get the biggest sticks you
want.

But what I found the scariest about this whole episode is that, of all
the people arrested, of all the people who had and were trafficking
these illegal unregistered automatic weapons whose only purpose is to
kill someone, only one is still in custody! And that's probably
because he was doing something else that wasn't all that nice.

No wonder people in this country, and in this community, shrug their
shoulders at the law.

Nowadays getting caught is just the price of doing business, and after
a day in jail you can be back at it.

I'm sure one of the stipulations of the court for these guys is that
they were told not to possess guns for awhile.

Hello! They weren't supposed to possess these guns in the first
place!

You can't blame the cops; they do all they can.

Justice, it seems by the firepower out there, is meted out in the
streets.

And what do the courts do when a guy gets caught with 27 Sten guns?
Let him back out on the street!

Has everyone forgotten the word "deterrence"?

Like keeping them locked up until their court date, then sentencing
them to some hard time.

Because these guns aren't toys, and they were on the street for one
purpose only - hunting people, and as far as I know there aren't any
open seasons on our species yet.