The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Dear Editor, When I was a young man living in rural Manitoba, I purchased a .22 caliber rifle for target practice and to hunt upland game birds. For most of the past 45 years the gun has sat locked up in its case unknown to the Government of Canada or its agencies. When I bought the gun there was no requirement to register or license it. The man who sold me the gun looked me over pretty good and took my money with comment about using it safely. He likely knew my parents. Over the years the rules to obtain firearms and hunt have become more regulated but because I haven't acquired or sold any more firearms and haven't hunted in years, I have managed to avoid any further involvement with the system until the mandatory registration of long guns under the Canadian Long Arm Registry came along. I didn't want to register my old .22 but I did it because it was the right thing to do. Somehow I knew there were many who didn't register their guns, as the controversy of gun registration never went away. Recently the Harper government supposedly abolished the gun registry and gave an amnesty to those who were not in compliance with the law. This made me very angry because of the trouble I went to register and re-register my firearm as required by the law over the years. What has transpired is the people who refused to register their firearms have been rewarded for thwarting the law by the amnesty. This delivers the wrong message to people; it says that if you don't like the law, don't follow it and you will be forgiven. I'm not sure that same rule of amnesty applies in any other context involving the laws that govern this country, but imagine the chaos if people generally were to stop following any government laws or regulation en masse. There is a fine line between the orderly governance of people and chaos, which can change overnight under the right conditions (e.g. earthquakes, floods, forest fires). I thought that I had put my anger aside regarding the amnesty of gun registry scofflaws when I recently a got a letter from the RCMP. As a law-abiding citizen, I rushed to open the letter to see if I had committed some traffic offence or if they had finally accepted me into the police academy that I applied to get into in 1967. No, the forms inside looked surprisingly similar and nearly identical to those initially required to register my firearm under the now defunct long-gun registry. The letter is from same address in Miramichi, New Brunswick, as the long-gun registry, but this time it's from the RCMP and not the Government of Canada. My first thoughts were, there must be some kind of mistake, the long-gun registry has been abolished and any records connecting me to my firearm were to be destroyed. It appears that the RCMP are now registering firearms for the government instead. I realize that the laws regarding firearms have changed over the years, but prior to the gun registry there was no requirement to register guns purchased before those laws came into effect. See 'Letter' on pg. Continued from pg. If there was a requirement to register all old firearms, I wasn't aware of it and if that's the case why was it necessary to set up the long-gun registry in the first place? At this point I felt completely victimized, sucked into the system so to speak. Even though the gun registry records were supposed to be destroyed, they have obviously been given to the RCMP and the gun registry lives on for those who were honest and compliant; all while the people who thwarted the law are forgiven for not following the law and continue to fly under the radar. How perverse is that! The new long-gun registry is called 'Application for Renewal of a Firearms License for an individual' but the forms are nearly identical to the registry forms. I never had a firearms license before the long-gun registry, so why should I be forced to renew it now? So now, in addition to having to fill out the forms every few years, I also have to go out and have a professional passport-type photo taken at my expense to submit with the application. Even if the so-called 'license' fee is waved, it's still costing me money. The object lesson here appears to be: Don't follow the law and you will be rewarded and forgiven, follow the law and you will be hounded, registered and periodically required to fill out forms and pay for photos and postage for life. Why do I feel that I have been taken in by the government and who am I supposed to be angry at, the people who never registered in the first place or the government who has now forgiven them for breaking the law? What happens now if I don't send in my registration? Will I be charged with an offense and have my gun confiscated? Will I be given amnesty for that? Do the previously 'forgiven' now have to 'license' their previously unregistered firearms, and how likely is that to happen? I feel like I am convicted for life for a crime I didn't commit while the real criminals get off anonymously! Convicted by the truth, Richard Lyons Winnipeg
