Former Tory cabinet minister faces three gun-related charges
Date: Jan 13, 2007 9:45 AM
PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE: 2007.01.13
PAGE: A13
BYLINE: TIMOTHY APPLEBY
SECTION: Toronto News
EDITION: Metro
WORD COUNT: 260

————————————————————————
——–

Former Tory cabinet minister faces three gun-related charges

————————————————————————
——–

Former Ontario Progressive Conservative cabinet minister John Snobelen
has been charged with three gun-related criminal offences after a
handgun and ammunition were allegedly found in his Milton home.

Halton Regional Police “received some information and detectives
followed up on it,” a spokesman said last night, without elaborating.

Armed with a search warrant, police raided the Snobelen home this week
and seized a Colt .22 semi-automatic pistol and bullets for it. Mr.
Snobelen, 52, was absent at the time.

Yesterday morning he surrendered to the Halton police station in Milton
and was released on an undertaking.

He is expected to appear in court early next week, charged with
unauthorized possession of a firearm, unlawful acquisition of a firearm
and careless storage of a firearm.

In line with standard practice, the gun is undergoing ballistic and
forensic tests. Police will also try to trace its history.

However, they stressed that beyond the charges laid there is nothing to
suggest the weapon has been used in any criminal activity.

Mr. Snobelen could not be reached immediately for comment.

He retired from politics four years ago, quietly resigning amid
accusations that he was spending too much time tending cattle at his big
ranch in Oklahoma and too little in the Ontario Legislature.

Before that, as an inner-circle member of the Mike Harris government,
Mr. Snobelen’s name often generated controversy.

In 1995, as newly minted education minister and overseer of changes to
the province’s public schools that were radical and often cathartic, the
high-school dropout stirred fury when he was captured on videotape
saying, “we need to invent a crisis” in the province’s education system.

In a later incarnation as Mr. Harris’s natural resources minister, Mr.
Snobelen helped shepherd revisions to hunting laws that lowered the
minimum hunting age to 12 from 15.

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !