www.nationalreview.com
Wed 08/02/00
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN CANADA
On guns, it’s not an oxymoron.

By Dave Kopel, director, and Dr. Paul Gallant & Dr. Joanne
Eisen, research associates, the Independence Institute

ONE DOESN’T EXPECT to hear the words “civil disobedience”
and “Canada” in the same sentence. It seems as unlikely as
hearing “the French people” juxtaposed with “humble,” or
reading “the Russian government” on the same page as
“honest.” Nevertheless, the Liberal Party government of
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chritien has provoked what may
be the largest, and longest-sustained, civil disobedience in
Canadian history.

Since 1977, Canada has licensed long-gun owners, and most
Canadian gun owners have complied with the licensing system.
Gun registration, however, has always been different. A
government effort to register long guns in 1940, under the
pretext of World War II, never got more than one-third of
the gun supply registered, and was abandoned in 1945.

Having failed at universal gun registration in the 1940s,
the Canadian government has now returned to the enterprise.
As of January 1, 2001, all firearms in a person’s possession
must be accounted for by a registration certificate.

So far, however, considerably fewer than a third of all
Canadian rifles and shotguns have been registered, so that
the final registration figures might not even match the weak
showing of the 1940 law. Today, in fact, Canadian gun owners
are going considerably further than the quiet decision their
ancestors made to ignore the 1940 law. R. Bruce Hutton -
formerly an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
Canada’s national police force – has formed the Law-Abiding
Unregistered Firearms Association (LUFA). Hutton has been
traveling
throughout Canada urging non-compliance with the new
Firearms Act, and exhorting fellow gun-owners, “Come to jail
with me.”

More than twenty thousand Canadian gun-owners had taken
Hutton up on his challenge – openly declaring their intent
to disobey the law by not complying with registration.
Hutton’s anger has clearly resonated among fellow Canadians,
proving that an ordinary man can make an extraordinary
difference.

When January 1, 2001, rolls around, LUFA’s members are
prepared to stand unarmed in front of RCMP offices and
submit, as felons, to their 5-year prison terms. LUFA’s
projected membership by that time will be enough to
overwhelm an already strained Canadian criminal-justice
system.

Hundreds of thousands of other Canadian gun-owners have made
known their intent to delay registration until the last
possible moment. Their forms will arrive all together in
the last few weeks, throwing the entire bureaucracy into
disarray.

Indeed, the registration bureaucracy is already acknowledged
as a disaster by independent observers. The registry was
promised to cost $120 million dollars (Canadian), but has
already cost approximately $325 million. The central
government has worked hard to keep taxpayers from obtaining
the government documents that detail the full costs, and
even to prevent taxpayers from finding out how many civil
servants and police officers are working on the gun
registry.

The provincial governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and
Manitoba have dumped both the administration and the
enforcement of all federal gun-control laws (including the
laws preceding the registration law) right back into
Ottawa’s lap, and announced that they will refuse to enforce
any federal gun controls.

Why are our usually obedient neighbors to the North so
feisty?

One reason is they have realized that gun registration
really does lead to confiscation. Handguns have been
registered in Canada since 1934, and for decades, the
Canadian government only used the registration records for
innocent purposes. But shortly after winning election in
November 1993, the new Chritien government imposed an
administrative decree banning over half of all handguns. The
current registered owners may retain the guns until they
die, and then the guns must be surrendered to the
government. No compensation will be
paid for the confiscation.

The gun-registration law, Bill C-68, gave the government the
authority to confiscate any and all rifles and shotguns,
whenever it wishes – a fact which Canada’s National Firearms
Association has been busily publicizing. Registration this
year is plainly a step towards confiscation a few years from
now.

Why is the Liberal Party pushing for registration so
resolutely, even as the registration law drives so many
Canadians – especially on the prairie – away from the
Liberal Party?

Public safety has nothing to do with it. The Justice
Department worked diligently to suppress an independent
research report – which had been commissioned by the Justice
Department – that showed the 1977 gun-owner licensing law
had been a failure.

One motive for registration is simply a crass – although
perhaps mistaken – political calculation that there are more
urban female votes to be gained by attacking “masculine”
culture than there are rural male votes to be lost. Indeed,
polling research of Canadian gun-control supporters shows
them to be almost perfectly ignorant of Canada’s
already-strict gun-control laws; their main motive for
wanting more gun control is not the expectation that people
will be safer, but their desire to express their antipathy
for “macho” values.

Addressing the 11th Annual Community Legal Education
Associations conference in January 1996, Senator Sharon
Carstairs made a telling admission when she thought no one
else was listening: The new Firearms Act was intended, from
the outset, to be integral to her party’s plans to “socially
re-engineer Canada.” Guns are favored by rural males, and
are associated with self-reliance, and are therefore
contrary to the Liberal Party’s desire for a feminized and
dependent nation.

In short, Canadian gun control is a sort of slow-motion hate
crime, perpetrated by the government. The real purpose is to
harm a minority whom the government dislikes. In the United
States, one need only attend a few anti-gun rallies -
especially rallies put on by the dishonestly named Million
Mom March – to find plenty of anti-gun activists for whom
hatred is obviously the guiding value.

The Canadian nation has always prided itself on tolerance.
The mean-spirited intolerance that animates Canada’s
anti-gun-owner laws is helping many Canadians understand
something that some of their British ancestors figured out
back in 1215 with King John and the Magna Carta: There comes
a time when a man who loves his country must tell his
government, “Stop. Not one bit further.”