Monday, August 20, 2018

Si Seulement...

By Zamboni

Enduring the nightmare that is Benedict Donald, we cats have found ourselves a little jealous of Canada's Parliamentary form of government. If the US had one, the Trumpsters would have crashed and burned in a vote of no confidence ages ago.

But we don't: The Founders gave us an ingenious system of three branches checking and balancing one another instead. It usually works — although surely Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the rest never envisioned one of the branches refusing to do its job. We hope that the midterms will rectify that situation.

Meanwhile, we continue to sigh with longing when we see Canadian news like this: The Montreal city council has unanimously voted for a nationwide ban on guns.

Not just in the city, or even in the province — nationwide. "We need bans that are clear and precise to reduce the number of [the] lethal weapons that are circulating in our society," the councilor who presented the motion declared.

Color us impressed. Sure, it took nearly 30 years since the massacre at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique to ask the federal government for a ban, but sometimes these things have to build. Since 1989, Canadians have seen just three mass shootings — the most recent one at a mosque last year — but they've apparently had enough. The Montreal measure restricts gun usage to cops and the military only.

How do our massacres stack up? See above. And why do we think that Canada may succeed where we've failed? Because they have no Second Amendment. We cats wish them luck, and we PURR.

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