Gun Control in Canada as the long gun registry is stopped.

The Times wants to paint this as some sort of change in Canadians where its more likely people just don't like this specific piece of bureaucracy.

A decade before the Columbine high school shootings set off a national debate on gun violence in the United States, an angry, unemployed 25-year-old armed with a semiautomatic hunting rifle stormed the École Polytechnique, an engineering school in Montreal. Shouting “I hate feminists,” the gunman separated the female students from the men and killed 14 women before killing himself. The crime was the sort that, even then, most Canadians thought could happen only in the United States. The anniversary was observed Sunday, as it has been every year since, by ceremonies across the nation. In Montreal, hundreds of people linked arms around a park near the school and about 1,000 people attended a vigil at Notre-Dame Basilica. Parliament’s response to the crime was passage of the long-gun registry, and few issues since have so divided rural and urban Canadians. The law’s looming demise has revived the national debate over gun control and, with the wounds of 1989 still tender, raised deep questions about Canadian identity. “Canada is suddenly changing into a place that loves guns and armies and war,” said Gerald L. Caplan, a prominent academic and former campaign director of the liberal New Democratic Party. “I don’t know how we got there but I don’t like it.” The law has been controversial since its approval in 1995, and there are competing theories as to why it suddenly appears doomed now. While Mr. Caplan cites a political shift signaled by the election of a Conservative government in 2006, many analysts credit an obscure Parliamentary maneuver by gun-control opponents that allowed them to assemble a voting majority. Perhaps most surprisingly, the debate has pitted the Conservative government, which generally promotes a law and order agenda and wants to get rid of the law, against the police, who resoundingly favor keeping it. Arguments on both sides have been emotional, with opponents of the law adopting what Canadians consider to be American-style personal attack ads against gun-control advocates.