On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 07:22:18AM -0600, ROBERT ZANUSSI wrote: > Yanni, you are talking history here, when you say guns are part of our > freedom. My point was you don't need a gun in Canada to be safe. When was the > last time you were accosted by criminals either on the street, in your house > or on your boat, while in Canada.
I think that you're basing this on a pretty narrow view of Canada. While I'll readily admit that the vast majority of Canada's urban population (which is, in turn, the vast majority of Canada's population) does not regularly encounter risks which could be mitigated by having a gun, there's still plenty of folks in the rest of Canada that are made safer by the possession of guns (including handguns). The most explicit examples are professions or circumstances for which the government may issue an Authorization To Carry a handgun (ATC). Generally speaking, if you drive an armoured car, or you work in the wilderness doing things that involve a degree of isolation and the use of your hands (e.g. surveying land, prospecting for minerals, or marking trees for selective harvesting) then, as far as our statutes and regulations are concerned, you have a legitimate need for a handgun for self protection. For a long gun, there is no requirement to obtain special permission to have one on hand for self protection, so it's not as easy to enumerate recognized uses, though it's quite clear that, were there not overwhelmingly more legitimate uses for long guns, regulations would be at least as strict as for handguns. To further this point, I used to arrange firearms licensing courses for students and researchers, at the University of Toronto, who required a firearms license for their field research. I don't recall any of them having required a license for restricted firearms (i.e. handguns). Clearly this sample cannot be representative (as it contains no need for handguns) but if it's close, it speaks to a lot more protection being done with long guns than with handguns. Personally, if it weren't for regulatory hassles when crossing borders (border crossings being something of a fact of life on the Great Lakes--except Lake Michigan), I'd be very much interested in having a Remington 870 Marine Magnum (12 gauge shotgun) on my boat to use for my distress flares. This preference was stronger when the flares were sold as single stars, and I felt vastly more confident in my ability to cycle a pump action shotgun than cycle/reload the break action plastic pistol in an emergency situation. That said, I still have the preference because the shotgun strikes me as better built and more reliable, a larger object to find/grab in a pinch (provided I don't do something stupid like store it in an awkward location), and additionally useful to go out hunting in the appropriate season. > Remember, you can have a gun when the bad guys don't but what happens if they > take that away from you? Do you have the guts to shoot an unarmed man? > Finally, you can only use deadly force in Canada when you reasonably fear > death or grieviously bodily harm to yourself or another person, and you must > be able to articulate that to a judge. Just because someone comes on your > boat does not give you the right to shoot him. > > Tell me, how are guns a part of our free culture here in Canada? And I am > refering to current times, not WW1 or 2 or any other armed conflict that > Canada has been involved in. Well apart from the foresters, surveyors, prospectors, armoured truck drivers, farmers, hunters, geologists, botanists, zoologists, and other researchers, we also have a target shooting team that competes internationally, including at the current Olympic Games (though please don't get me started on their performance at the current games before acknowledging that the crucial skill of target shooting is the ability to clear one's mind and focus on the shot being taken, and reading about the delightful little distraction the City of Toronto felt compelled to impose upon Avianna Chao immediately before the start of the Games). Unfortunately, the current call for a "total handgun ban" in Canada either ignores the workplace safety issues for people with ATCs, or is strictly focused on athletes (i.e. target shooters) and collectors. Of course it's also based on a completely bogus piece of rhetoric, that handguns are designed only to kill people, when the reality is that they're designed to be drawn quickly and operable with one hand for basically the same purposes that a long gun would be used. Firearms actually are a significant part of our free culture in Canada, and while I don't oppose our having a system of licensing for them, the registration of long guns appears to have been a colossal waste of money (as identified by the Auditor General) -- money that could have been spent on things that actually save lives, like medical research and firefighting equipment, or even on social services in communities experiencing problems with violence. As for a ban, it would be like the long gun registry, only moreso (unless you think that it's appropriate for a free society to confiscate some billion dollars worth of property from its citizens without compensation, including appraisal, appeals of appraisals, etc.) Finally, you mention armed conflict as a use of guns. Sadly, this is the only use for firearms that most people can think of, and because armed conflict is frequently so ugly, these people identify firearms as being somehow inherently evil for their role in said same. It's kind of distressing how many people take a position on armed conflict that we can somehow make it go away by getting rid of the arms (never mind the practicalities of enforcing such a prohibition). There's a widespread ignorance of the fact that if you remove the arms from armed conflict, you still have conflict (e.g. brutal beatings), but if you remove the conflict, your left with disused arms, and maybe a few sports. In order to address violence, we have to focus on where it lives, and violence lives in the heart, not in the holster. Cheers, Kris -- Kris Coward http://unripe.melon.org/ GPG Fingerprint: 2BF3 957D 310A FEEC 4733 830E 21A4 05C7 1FEB 12B3 _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
