After posting the excerpt from Gunter’s recent column, I came across some other fantastic pieces he has written on the firearms situation in Canada.
Both of these editorials are informative and well-argued:
The following money quote from the second article demonstrates the unenviable legal position that gun owners often find themselves in:
The Crown’s actions would seem to indicate that they believe guns must be unloaded and locked at all times, even when in use. (Huh?) In short, prosecutors seem to arguing that Canadians may own guns, so long as they keep them safely stored at all times. As soon as they take them out of their safes to hunt or target shoot or ward off bad guys, the guns are no longer safely stored, so owners are by default guilty of storing them unsafely.
You think I’m kidding, but I have been following federal gun control efforts since they began in 1995, and it would not surprise me a bit that prosecutors are so obsessed with pursuing administrative gun crimes (such as failing to obtain a license or register a shotgun) that they have tied themselves in a knot of logic in which any removal of a gun from storage, even for legal purposes, is a crime.