In another example of the police misinterpretation of “safe storage” laws, a gun collector had all of his firearms returned to him and the charges against him dismissed after a judge found that the Crown could not prove that his firearms were stored unsafely.
The Toronto Sun reports:
“I find the cabinets in which the defendant’s prohibited firearms were stored fall within the definition of a safe,” the judge said in her decision. “Both of the lockers in which the prohibited firearms were stored were made of steel. Each cabinet was securely locked. The Crown has not proven beyond a reasonable double that there was non-compliance with the regulation.”
The accused’s lawyer pointed out the great irony in the charges against his client and commented on the present state of the law:
“The ironic thing is a lot of the safes were bought at government auctions,” Sombrero’s lawyer David Costa said. “Parliamentarians owe a service to gun collectors to properly set out what it means to store weapons, what constitutes a safe, what constitutes a vault or specialized room.”