Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 09:26:58 -0600
From: "Gunter, Lorne (EDM_EXCHANGE)"
Subject: A non-gun owner defends the right to keep and bear arms Pt.II

I have never owned a gun.

I have never hunted.

I have never even fired a gun.

I barely know the business end from the thingee at the other end.

So what am I doing here speaking to you, a group of sportsmen?

In short, I have come to encourage you to keep your guns; to plead with you to bear whatever burden the goernment imposes on you in order to do so and to pass on your interest in the shooting sports on to your children and grandchildren. If you don't, THEY (the government and the anti-gunners) will win.

But why should I care whether you own guns or not? I will probably never own guns, so it doesn't make much difference to me personally if guns are always available for sale to private citizens.

I don't want to live in a society in which only the police and military have guns.

The Luther Pastor Martin Niemoeller said famously, "In (Nazi) Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew...Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."

That means I am here tonight for selfish reasons. Government should be limited. It should have limited power to regulate and dictate and advise us in our lives, our homes, families, properties, communities and businesses. And any government that has lost sight of these limits to such an extent that it has come to view the private ownership of firearms as a threat to the general well-being is a threat to my freedom. Any government that can come today for your guns, can come tomorrow for my computer.

If a government sees nothing wrong with its trampling of your right to own firearms, it may eventually see nothing wrong in squashing my right to free speech. Oh, it would never see itself as trashing free speech, just as it is

convinced it is not trampling your right to own guns. It may well do with speech as it has done with firearms, claim the right never existed in the first place, or that it existed, but always within significant and necessary limits.

Or it may wait until a majority no longer remembers what free speech means, and then it will claim, as it has with firearms, that it is merely acting on the democratic will.

But one way of the other, if it has overstepped its bounds on firearms, it easily could some day overstep its bounds on a right that affects me.

Expect no relief soon though from either governments or the courts, because both have become deaf to any arguments but their own. Those who populate government and the courts are members of the same elite, and that elite has become so imbued with its own self-importance and intelligence that it never occurs to it members any thought they have, any idea that enters their heads might be wrong.

A noted liberal scholar, Garen Wintemute of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, recently wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that many of the most common ‘‘gun controls’’ were next to useless in preventing firearms crime. Buy-backs and hand-ins don't work. Assault weapons bans don't work. And, his work implied, neither do registries.

Sending lots of police into neighbourhoods with lots of crime at times when crimes normally occur, that worked really well at cutting crime. D-uh. Tougher penalties for using illegal weapons worked. As did tougher dealer licensing, instant background checks and preventing large volume handgun – handgun (not long gun) – purchases.

In other words, focussing police efforts on cracking down on criminals who use guns works. Concentrating on firearms in the possession of lawful citizens produces few, if any results.

But will the chattering classes listen to Wintemute? Nope. They will now do one of two things: ignore him or slander him. He was an expert when he was on-side. Now that he has simply told the truth, it will be said that there were always doubts about his qualifications or methodology.

Politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, even law school academics have little or no understanding of the Common Law right to own firearms.

William Blackstone, the great 18th-Century English legal scholar, traced the right to own arms back to the time of King Canute in the 11th Century. By the time of the Assize of Arms in 1181, the right was known as an "ancient" right.

Blackstone identified three absolute rights, rights that could not circumscribed except in the most dire of situations: The right to personal security (including a very aggressive right to self-defence); the right to personal liberty (freedom of movement, action and thought); and the right to own and enjoy property.

To protect these absolute rights, Blackstone identified five subsidiary rights as already existing in Common Law in his day: a freely elected Parliament; limits on the power of the monarch; due process of law; the right to petition the monarch or Parliament for redress of grievances; AND the right to own arms.

It is said Canadians do not have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms the way Americans do, which is true. Until Allan Rock and Anne McLellan we had something better, a right extending back nearly 1,000 years; a right that was so basic and well understood it did not need to be written down.

But as our connection to our rural past, our masculine traditions and to our subsistence way of life have declined, so has the understanding among our elites of the civilian role of firearms in free society. Guns are no longer tools in the homes of the elite, but rather just props in the televisions shows and movies they watch. Elite impressions about firearms are not formed by direct personal experience -- ie. by knowledge -- but by ignorance, prejudice and fear. And, boy, aren't those good factors to be driving public policy.

There is also among our elites no fear of government and no sense of freedoms lost to government. The rapid and unchecked growth of government has increased their power, not decreased it. Since they are in charge of government, it remains their servant not their master. They delude themselves into thinking that all Canadians are fully free, because of all the people they know and associate with, none is prevented by government from doing or saying anything he or she might want to do or say.

There is also a lot of unconscious snobbery. They firmly believe they know better than you.

Which brings me back to my real purpose here tonight.

Among the dozens of press release and news reports I see each month on firearms, one I saw this week really troubled me. It was from the Montreal Gazette of 3 February, and it is headed "Many gun-owners said to be giving up weapons to avoid bother of registering."

Now this is a story by a journalist who probably holds some pretty typical views about guns and is based on an interview with an apparently anti-gun police chief. So I'm not sure it's facts and figures are reliable. But if it is true, even just a little, the trend disturbs me.

We who value the private ownership of firearms often quote Ronald Reagan when he said "Guns don't kill people, people do," which is exactly so. But then we also say that guns are safeguards of our liberty and rights, which is not so.

Guns don't safeguard liberty, gun owners do.

I believe the Liberals were just dumb enough to believe their registry could be made to work and, once implemented, would create "a culture of safety" that would reduce crime and violence. I suspect it was never more than a minor goal of theirs to over-complicate the lawful ownership of firearms to such an extent that many casual owners threw up their hands in frustration, gave up their sports and got rid of their guns.

But my guess is that it is beginning to dawn on the Liberals that while the registry is a bust – a colossal, expensive bust – if they can keep it open long enough tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lawful gun owners will call it quits. They will have disarmed a significant portion of the population without really trying.

I said before that I don't want to live in a society where only the police and military have guns, despite my tremendous respect for both the police and military. Guns are symbols of where the real power is in society, and who the true sovereigns are. And I do not choose to live in a society where even the most benign police officers and soldiers are the sovereigns.

A government that doesn't trust its ordinary citizens to own guns should not be trusted to own guns itself.

The American writer William F. Buckley, Jr. likes to say he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book, than the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty. And frankly, I'd rather be ruled by duck hunters, skeet shooters and firearms collectors than by the politicians, bureaucrats and chiefs of police who have lined up to limit the private ownership of firearms.

Every time a gun shop owner locks his doors for the last time, every time a hunter hangs up his orange vest for good, every time a gun club has too few members to compete for all its trophies, every time a Canadian gives up his guns with a sigh and a shrug, every time that happens, Allan Rock and Anne McLellan, Wendy Cukier and Richard Mosley*come one step closer to achieving the gun-free Canada they dream of.

Don't let that happen.

Don't (if you'll pardon my French) let the bastards win.

Thank you.

*(In order: the former Minister of Justice (who introduced Canada's latest ‘‘gun controls’’), the current Minister of Justice (who refuses to alter them), Canada's leading anti-gun activist and the senior federal anti-gun bureaucrat.)

____________________
Lorne Gunter, Columnist
The Edmonton Journal
P.O. Box 2421
Edmonton AB CANADA
T5J 2S6
off tele: (780) 429-5267
fax: (780) 429-5500 (requires a cover page)
cell: (780) 916-0719