Off By a Long Shot

What the Gun Control Debate is Really About
by Brit Griffin
September/October 1997
HighGrader Magazine

"Sing me a song about rifles and guns
Winchesters and Colt-44s."
- Fred J. Eaglesmith

by Brit Grffin
Ches' Rod-n-Gun Shop wasn't the kind of store a woman like me just walked into. It's not as if I wouldn't have been welcome. More than one big fella would have been willing to help me work my way through the mysterious collection of 410s, 30-ott-6's and 12 gauge pumps in search of the perfect tool to protect my children from rabid foxes or maruading bears. No doubt there were lots of women who regularly walked in to buy squiggly things and lures off the shelves. But I wasn't that kind of gal.
I only had the nerve to go in there twice. The first time was because I wanted to see what was really behind the white foil on the windows that kept the sun out of that cool, dark interior. It was a small shop, too intimate to browse anonymously. There were racks of guns, new and used, a jumble of fishing rods, a plethora of bait accessories, the big minnow tank in the back and along the service counter-rows of stools, always full of local guys, shooting the breeze, talking man talk. As soon as the door closed behind me, I panicked. The store exposed me for what I was, an interloper in a male domain. This place had macho mystique in spades. I felt as tongue-tied and akward as a garage mechanic in a lingerie store.
The second time I went in, the mystique was gone.  The foil was off the windows, the shelves were bare and Ches Proctor, the owner, was hauling the last bits of his male cathedral into an old pick-up truck. For 13 years he had run the one gun shop in town. Ches says it was hard to give up the shop but notes that stores like his are closing all across the country. Part of it, of course, is the invasion of the big chains with cheaper stock. But the real problem is Bill C-68.

In the wake of Bill C-17, the last piece of gun control legislation in 1992, retails sales of guns have fallen 60% across the country. Ches maintains that once the government began drafting Bill C-68, its latest gun control legislation, sales plummeted further. He says his customers are worried about the intent of the complex and lengthy piece of legislation, covering not only the mandatory registration of all firearms but also a wide variety of related issues, such as storage requirements, extensive police powers of search and seizure and open-ended amendment powers for the Minister of Justice. Ches says his customers believe that they are being targeted to assage urban fears of violent crime.
Such a perspective hasn't gotten much play in the media. The pro and anti legislation lobby have framed their arguments in terms of statistics and the efficacy of crime control measures. But Bill C-68 is really a struggle of cultures, the dividing line in the sand between an essentially rural and urban constituency.

Every Man a Marc Lepine
Bill C-68 was introduced to Canadians with much fanfare by then Justice Minister Allan Rock on December 6, 1996. The timing was not accidental. December 6th was the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre and Rock was using the anniversary to promise a largely urban audience that his government was going to put the gun owners and the wife killers in their place.
Bill C-17, the previous round of gun control legislation, had been brought in by the Conservatives as a response to the December 6th killings. Bill C-68 was drafted in spite of the fact that there were are already strict limits on the kinds of weapons that could be used and a complex array of rules and laws already covered gun ownership in the country.
Seen in the light of the Montreal massacre, opponents to Bill C-68 could not win. The murder of female students at the Ecole Polytechnic by Marc Lepine has been enshrined as the defining Golgotha in the war of men (who have the guns) against women (who do not). The fact that bad things like the Montreal massacre sometimes happen and will continue to happen in a fragmented society, no matter what laws society drafts, took a distant second to a major publicity campaign by women's organizations and anti-gun groups for the government to do something dramatic in response.
From an urban perspective Bill C-68 probably seemed like a perfectly reasonable piece of legislation - require gun owners to register their guns, tighten up storage requirements and purchasing rules and broaden police powers to keep weapons out of the hands of potential abusers. The fact that a broadbased backlash from across rural Canada rose up to meet this bill was dismissed as paranoid and too closely connected with the powerful gun lobby in the United States.
The Minister, who, on other occassions mused out loud that the only people who should have access to guns are police and soldiers (ie. the state), had little patience for the gun owners who worried that the registration was the first step on the road to confiscation.
Opponents to Bill C-68 didn't fare too well in the urban media, either. Rural people can explain until they're blue in the face that in the country guns are looked upon as tools - some for varmit control, some for hunting and some, yes, for recreational enjoyment. The fact is, many urban voters wouldn't see much difference between the farmer in Saskatchewan who opposes registering his 20 guage single shot and the whacko in camouflage running around the hills of Minnesota with an AK-47.

Being able to draw on the fear of rising gun crimes in the city, the perception of a male war against women and such emotionally laiden events as the December 6th massacre, the gun-control advocates seized the moral highground. They tended to look better on camera and wielded emotional ammunition that is very diffuclt to confront. After all, what reasonable Canadian wouldn't want to do everything in their power to prevent another Marc Lepine from killing innocent women?
More than a few women have told me that Bill C-68 is going to stop men from shooting their wives and children. I had no idea that this was a national pastime. Is it? Alan Rock reminded us that a women is killed every 5 or 6 days by firearms. He could have said that a woman dies every two days owing to "surgical/medical misadventures" or every four hours due to mental disorders. Nor did it seem to warrant comment that a man is killed every two days by a firearm, more than twice as often as women.
In 1993, there were 45 domestic murders involving firearms. Between 1988- 1991 only 5.1% of all violent crimes involved firearms. Of the 1400 people killed by firearms every year, the vast majority are by suicide or accident. And gun accidents don't come close to the amount of deaths caused by accidental drownings. To place the same degree of concern on swimming accidents  would require guards at every private pool and swimming hole in Canada and prospective swimmers paying for an array of licenses and examinations before they were allowed into the water.
The question is not really whether Canada needs gun control or not. The country is already governed by much more serious gun laws than exist in the United States. Further, in Canada, there is a general consensus that handguns should not be available to the general population and that weapons like assault rifles and submachine guns belong on the movie screen not generally in people's basements. What needs to be addressed is whether Bill C-68 is a necessary piece of legislation, whether it is good social policy and whether it will be able to impact on the level of violence in our society.

Register My Gun? Hell No!
Bill C-68 is supposed to weed out undesirable people from getting access to guns. Not an unreasonable desire. But there are laws already in place to do this. When someone applies for a Firearms Acquisition Certificate (FAC) he is required to provide references and is screened for mental health problems, financial stability and a criminal record by the police. When someone purchases a firearm the serial number is kept on record. To obtain a hunting license a special safety course is required. Police already have the power to remove firearms from any home where there is a history of domestic violence.
Mark Holmes of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) believes that Bill C-68 was so hastily conceived that it will only bring confusion and will duplicate existing requirements. "Bill C-68, from its very inception to the very end, is a very bad piece of law. One of the reasons is that there are no definitions, there are no caveats, there is no direction on it. And already you're seeing signs of this because depending on what jurisdiction you are in, depends on how its enforced.  You may be doing something perfectly legal in North Bay but in Toronto you're arrested and have a criminal record. Nobody understands it. How  can anybody understand it, it is worded so ambiguously."
Wendy Cukier is President of the Coalition for Gun Control. A Professor of Business Administration at Ryerson in Toronto, she has been spearheading the Coalition's efforts to see Bill C-68 implemented. She dismisses such criticism as ideological. "A hunter in northern Ontario is more likely to believe his buddies at the Ontario Federation of Hunters and Anglers than me. At the same time we have very good support from police chiefs and injury support groups in the north because those deal front line with the result of access to guns. Fundamentally it comes down to a question of who do you believe. The cops and the physicians and the suicide prevention experts and the domestic violence experts say this law will save lives and reduce crime and you have the gun lobby saying, oh no, it won't. Well, okay, who do you believe?"

But beliefs about the crime fighting nature of Bill C-68 may be taking a back seat to deeper held cultural biases against  hunters and gun owners. Taylor Buckner is a retired Professor from Concordia University. He has studied the gun control issue extensively. In "Gun Control - Will it Work?" he surveys attitudes towards gun control. It is interesting to note that the respondents who most strongly opposed hunting and the right to own firearms "support registration at any cost whether or not they think gun control will be effective". 
Chances are, though, that it won't be very effective legislation anyway. Buckner says that the registration of every gun is not as simple as it sounds.
"I think that about half of the firearms owners could not describe their firearms on all seven points that are required accurately enough to make the registration mean anything. So if you have to bring in somewhere between 8 and 20 million firearms to have someone look at them we might as well just shut down all the police in Canada for a year because they are not going to have time for anything else."
From the beginning, critics have argued that voluntary registration would have been received more favourably if it was done through gun clubs or even as an  insurance scheme. Buckner maintains that these reasonable alternatives were never even considered and that in fact the legislation was passed "...with an unremitting hostility towards gun owners".  The Bill effectively punishes law-abiding gun owners. The Bill gives extensive search and seizure powers to police. There does not need to be any suspicion that your gun was used in connection with a crime to justify a search  of your home. You are obliged to assist the police and are liable for criminal charges if you do not. If you have violated any of the provisions of Bill C-68, your firearms can be confiscated without compensation.
If you are an associate of someone who has been prohibited from owning a firearm, you too can be prohibited from owning a firearm. The legislation provides no definition of what constitutes an Ôassociate'. Perhaps such a provision might make sense if we are talking about spouses, but it becomes highly problematic if we are looking at hunting buddies, neighbours or employees. Many more people are killed by drunk drivers than by guns. Using the same logic of Bill C-68, if you are the associate of someone who has been charged with drunk driving, police would be able to confiscate your vehicle on the chance that your associate (friend, workmate, brother-in-law) might get access to your car.
Many rural citizens believe that the registry of guns could be used by future governments to further restrict the collection or ownership of guns. At the very least, it represents another major government incursion into everyday life and promises to be a sin tax with a guaranteed upward spiral.
Wendy Cukier dismisses the belly-aching about cost as part of the gun-lobby's "campaign of misinformation": "Alot of the opposition (to Bill C-68) is based on deliberate misrepresentation by the gun lobby which has tried to say that there is a slippery slope and that registration is the first step to confiscation and that it really is part of a massive conspiracy to ban all guns and that it will cost a $100.00 to register a gun and blah, blah blah."
The fee to register is being touted as a mere $10, that is until 2000 when it rises to $60.00, to be renewed every five years. On top of that is the cost of the FAC - $50.00, followed by a new mandatory safety course - another $50. Then there is a Ministry exam which, depending on where you live, may cost another $20. All this before you even go out and buy the firearm. If you want to hunt, you have to buy a hunting license and new hunters are obliged to take yet another safety course, all with a price tag attached.

Cukier says the legislation balances the needs of hunters with public safety and that the framework does not "unnecessarily infringe on people's abilities to hunt or target shoot or even collect." For rural types, many who are already coping with severely depressed economies, however, the costs associated with gun bureaucracy are by no means trivial.

The Underlying Score
Bill C-68 is confusing, redundant and cumbersome; it may be impossible to enforce. But underlying the melee over statistics and the arguments about the efficacy of Bill C-68 as a crime control vehicle, lie some fundamental ideological positions that need to be put on the table. Taylor Buckner sees it as a regional divide.
"The rise of urban ascendancy has made an enormous difference. Urban folks, by and large, don't know where food comes from. Animals are cute, animals talk, I mean goodness, a pig even talked in a recent movie. People have grown up with the PBS nature series where man is always the evil thing and man's destroying the animals and such. There's been 30 or 40  years of constant mystification of the realities of nature."
Buckner claims that as rural populations get older and smaller, the anti-hunting mythology gains momentum. In his study "Sex and Guns: Is Gun Control Male Control?" Buckner attempted to identify people's motivations behind their positions on gun control. He describes the battle over gun control as "part of other symbolic conflicts", such as the tension between the genders as well as rural and urban differences. Men who tend to be pro-gun control reject traditional male roles, are against hunting and have little experience with guns. Women who are pro-gun control "do so in the context of controlling male violence and sexuality".
Although Cukier down-played the gender issue in the HighGrader interview, comments quoted in the Ottawa Citizen tend to reinforce Buckner's claims. She characterizes opposition to gun control as representative of the Ôcult of masculinity', which is incompatible with Ôthe major cultural paradigm shift' society is currently experiencing. In other words, men who like to hunt, own guns or target shoot are cultural anachronisms. Their time has past and it is up to the new paradigm to constrain the old.
Hunters are very aware of these negative attitudes. Mark Holmes says, "The anti-gun movement would have you believe that its a bunch of beer-drinking, beer-bellied, testosterone charged  men going out and blasting at anything that moves and that is the best image of a hunter that they can provide. Watch how any Disney movie portrays hunters. I mean its pathetic. They portray them all as poachers and evil people."
Mark Holmes points out that hunters play a large role in conservation efforts across the country. It is the hunters "... that are out there hip-deep in swamp mud, rehabilitating wetlands, re-creating spawning beds that have been destroyed through industrial and agricultural processes, they are the ones doing all the work to enhance the wildlife."
The image of the nasty hunter as conjured up by Disney films is merely one the many manifestations of the negative rural strereo-typing. We are all familiar with the depiction of the  deserted gravel road, the surly looking beer-bellied boys in the pick-up truck, all with dark secrets, narrow minds and itchy trigger-fingers.  Think small-town and many of us are already hearing the banjo from Deliverance.  Add to these stereo-types the new image of the Michigan militia and you've got a blockbuster. Bill C-68 speaks to the urban need to constrain and limit the terrain of the rural menace.
Granted, rural people can conjure their own outrageous scenarios about the potential whackos lurking at every bus stop in the city. It is part of human nature for people to be a little suspicious of a world they don't really know, whether it is rural or urban. The difference, however, is that rural Canada does not drive the media engine. Nor do their irrational fears form the basis of government policy.

The debate over Bill C-68 has gotten more acrimonious with the passage of time, not less. Gun owners I know who didn't have an opinion on the legislation two years ago are now very vocal. Rural communities have alot at stake in the legislation and in the increasing moves to limit the rights of gun owners. The failure to appreciate this fact by urban Canada only fuels rural (and regional) alienation.
Mark Holmes puts it into perspective: "The vast majority of hunting and firearms ownership is something that is passed down from generation to generation. Dad taking his son or daughter out and showing how to shoot cans with a .22 and then teaching them about animals and nature and being ethical. And it's a social thing too, I'm sure in your area  the whole town shuts down in moose season. Will your town be better for the elimination of firearms?"
The cultural diversity of northern and rural communities depends upon the ability to perserve the particular relationship that these communities have with Ôthe bush'. This means hunting and gun ownership. Ches' Rod-n-Gun Shop was a male enclave. It is gone now and the cultural landscape is a little more barren for its absence. In its place is a beauty parlour. A fitting symbol, perhaps, for the shifting paradigm.   

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