Wednesday, October 03, 2007 Rama: On hold till mid-November By Karlon N. Rama Stage Five
FOR the second time this year, all activities related to the shooting sports are deemed cancelled to make way for an election.
As one of his final acts in office, former PNP chief Oscar Calderon issued a Letter of Instruction (LOI) to all PNP regional, provincial and city directors that all standing permits to transport and permits to carry are deemed temporarily suspended.
The LOI, which his newly-appointed replacement Deputy Director General Avelino “Sonny” Razon is bound to enforce, is in consonance with a Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc resolution.
The ban began midnight of Sept. 29, coinciding with the date the Comelec began accepting the Certificates of Candidacy (COCs) of those intending to run for either Barangay or Sangguniang Kabataan posts. It will end on the midnight of Nov. 13.
The Comelec set the date believing it provides sufficient time to allow it to conduct the canvass and proclaim the election winners.
According to the PNP, firearm owners may secure gun ban exemptions covering the 45-day period from the Comelec pursuant to Sec. 261 of the Omnibus Election Code, as amended by Sec. 32 of Republic Act 7166.
By personal experience, however, the odds of getting one are slim unless the applicant is a member of the Philippine Practical Shooting Association (PPSA) and routes his or her application via his or her gun club. The gun club endorses the application to the PPSA national office who will, in turn, endorse it to Comelec in Manila.
It is not yet known, though, if the PPSA is accepting applications for exemptions. And given how fees need to be paid, vis-à-vis the short duration of the gun ban period, the PPSA may just decide to wait out the gun ban and cancel or postpone its own activities for the next 45 days.
Being lawful citizens, we have no choice but to comply with the gun ban.
We don’t have to like it—we can talk freely about how stupid it is because it treats crimes already covered by existing laws and because many politicians and their private armies ignore it anyway—but we still have to follow it.
So, unless we secure exemptions, remember to clean and lubricate those pistols, rifles and shotguns before storing them securely in their respective cases, ladies and gentlemen. We don’t want them rusted come mid-November.
Violating Nanking. A hardbound book I borrowed from Kamagong Gun Club’s Andy Chua kept me awake from Saturday night until mid Sunday morning. The book was published in 1997 and written by journalist and Johns Hopkins University fellow Iris Chang who was then only 29.
The book is a riveting account of atrocities committed by Japanese troops against Chinese citizens in their six-week occupation of the ancient city of Nanking (Nanjing) following their invasion in December of 1937.
“The Rape of Nanking” showed how the Japanese, and their Korean conscripts, not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured and murdered more then 300,000 Chinese civilians.
And it tells of a second rape—how one of the worst war crimes in history continues to be denied by the Japanese government and how the tale has been left out in the history books of Japanese schools. There is hardly any difference here with the way Filipino comfort women of World War 2 were later regarded.
I choked upon reading the account of a Tan Shunsan, a Nanking survivor who at the time of the writing of the book was already in his eighties, of a killing contest between two Japanese lieutenants.
He narrated how he was among those Chinese civilians rounded up from the streets, bound by the hands with a piece of wire, and herded into one of four long lines of made up of his fellow countrymen. He’d been in hiding a mere minutes before but he decided to give up his spot, curious to find out if what a friend had said about the Japanese—that they looked astonishingly like a Chinese—was true.
