Rebuttal of an Ottawa Citizen article

I'm sure a lot of people have seen the series on gun control this week in the Ottawa Citizen, as I have...I know a non-biased report wouldn't exactly sing our praises and champion our cause, but I can't help feeling the need to go over this one...A real let down, especially since the writer actually consulted gun owners and made trips to the range.

I'll post the article here, with my comments being in bold.

Under Canada's gun laws, firearms enthusiasts such as Mr. Tomlinson occupy the narrowest niche of legal gun ownership. Today, there are only an estimated few thousand people licensed to own fully automatic guns, and every year their numbers get a bit smaller.

"We're dying off," said Mr. Tomlinson, a 73-year-old retired laboratory supervisor who now fights for the rights of gun owners as president of the National Firearms Association.

Although their numbers may be dwindling, prohibited owners still hold an impressive arsenal of fully automatic weapons. As of last November, there were more than 7,100 legally registered fully automatics in circulation across the country, according to gun registry data obtained by the Citizen.

The guns range in age from Second World War antiques and Tommy guns of Chicago gangland fame to the modern German machine-pistols and fully automatic versions of the famed Kalashnikov AK-47.

Their presence in the community unsettles some in law enforcement and keeps them under the regulatory microscope. With each round of revisions to Canada's gun control regime, the legal usage of automatic weapons has been curbed; their owners worry that the government will move to take their guns away altogether, as Australia did in 1996.

It isn't that the Govt. might move to take them away, so much as that they already have moved to do it. The Liberals have pleged a ban on all semi automatics, which would impact over 700,000 privately owned firearms. Would they really not grab these ones as well?

But some collectors are fighting back and launching legal challenges to win back the right to shoot the guns on approved ranges.

Why shouldn't their owners have this right? If someone wished to use one improperly, would he drive out to the shooting range and try it surrounded by armed people? If this isn't slowly doing away with them, what is it?

The Canadian prohibition on fully automatic weapons came into force in 1978, but rather than confiscate the guns outright, the government granted "grandfathered" status to anyone who legally owned them at the time.

Today, the youngest legal owner of these firearms would be 47 years old. They are grandfathers who are grandfathered, geezers with guns. As the older members of the group die off, the number of prohibited guns in circulation shrinks. If owners want to get rid of their guns, they can sell or trade them only to other grandfathered owners. Otherwise, they must decommission them or turn them in to police for destruction. If the owners die, most prohibited guns must be decommissioned or destroyed. (Under certain conditions, some handguns can be passed on to relatives.)

Don't forget that since they have been banned from use, lots of people have been deactivating them and selling them.

"People who are 47 or older have the possibility of being first-class citizens, and all the rest of the people are second-class citizens based on age," said Mr. Tomlinson. "Ten or 15 years from now, it's going to be a very different equation."

After the 1989 massacre at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Kim Campbell's Progressive Conservative government expanded the list of prohibited guns by adding fully automatics that had been converted into semi-automatics. Under Jean Chretien, the Liberals went even further in 1995, prohibiting a list of semi-automatic rifles and other guns that some referred to as "assault weapons."

So it USED to be a machine gun, but now it has been converted to semi automatic. Since it is limited to five rounds anyway, why was a ban neccessary there, except to drum up votes from ignorant or misinformed people. Also, I would like to point out that the rifle used by the Polytechnique shooter was neither fully automatic nor semi automatic. In an attempt to convert a semi to full auto, he wrecked it and turned it into a bolt action repeater. Meaning he had to reload after every shot fired.

Again, both revisions stopped short of confiscating guns outright. The updates to the law instead created new classes of grandfathered owners and introduced a tangle of sometimes-confusing regulations describing who can own what.

These guns make up a small and declining segment of Canada's firearms inventory. Of the seven million legally registered guns in circulation, only about three per cent are classed as prohibited. Most of these -- 90 per cent -- are handguns with short barrels or prohibited calibres.

10 percent of three percent? What does that make?

The really serious stuff -- the machine-guns and semi-automatic rifles that the government considered dangerous enough to ban by name -- today number more than 21,000. About three-quarters of these are owned by individuals. They include the bulky MG42 machine-guns used by German troops in the Second World War, the Steyr AUG carried by British special forces, and a long list of AK-47s made under different names in a dozen countries. The FN FAL rifle issued to Canadian troops through the Cold War era is another favourite of collectors. There are more than 3,000 of these currently registered.

21,000? But I thought there was only 7,100 in circulation? Oh thats right, these AK-47s and MG-42s are semi automatics anyway! So how is a semi automatic AK-47 any different from a restricted class semi automatic rifle? They are the same length, and they are both limited to 5 round magazines by law. Answer? They are not different at all

Perhaps the most notorious members of the prohibited list are the Uzis. Mr. Tomlinson is one of a small group of Canadians who own the stubby little submachine-guns popularized by Israeli troops during the Six Day War in 1967.

The Uzi is light, easy to hide, and capable of firing its 9-mm ammunition at a pace of 900 rounds per minute. It got its biggest plug in 1981, in an iconic photograph of a U.S. Secret Service agent holding one aloft during the attempted assassination of then-president Ronald Reagan.

Since then, it has been a staple of Hollywood movies and gangster culture. An Uzi also figured, infamously, in a 1984 shooting rampage at a San Diego-area McDonald's.

Today, there are 287 Uzis registered in Canada that are either fully automatic or have been converted to semi-automatic. Forty of them are listed in central Toronto. Two Uzi submachine-guns were reported stolen in 2005: one from a museum on Vancouver Island, another from an individual in the Kingston area.

Even though the numbers of prohibited firearms such as the Uzi are continually dropping, the potential for them to fall into the wrong hands concerns the Canadian Police Association.

"We come across those types of weapons very frequently when we're executing search warrants for drugs," said Tom Stamatakis, a Vancouver police officer and CPA vice-president.

Exotic military-style guns are particularly common in Vancouver's booming drug industry, he said. "These are the types of weapons they want to use. It becomes a bit of a status symbol for them. It's sexy, similar to what they're seeing in movies."

But gun enthusiasts argue that if criminals are getting these kinds of guns, they're doing it illegally. In B.C., police acknowledge a heavy guns-for-drugs trade in which Canadian marijuana producers exchange the drug for illegal weapons from the U.S.

In pleading their case, they have no stats on how many of these prohibited firearms have been taken from legal owners. What does that tell you? Does anyone really think it is hard to come by one if you are smuggling drugs into or out of the US? Cocaine and heroin are banned, both arrive here by the ton daily. Maybe the gangsters are a much bigger issue than the guns?

Gun owners say that prohibitions on law-abiding gun owners have no effect on the illegal trade.

"You're targeting a class of law-abiding people and cracking down on them when they're not the problem," said Tom Opgenorth, an Edmonton software developer who owns two prohibited guns.

"The laws didn't do anything to prevent these gangs from getting hold of them and using them," said Mr. Opgenorth.

John Evers, a Southern Ontario businessman who is as passionate about shooting as he is about growing orchids, said the government is wasting its resources by prohibiting guns that "look mean" as a way to control crime.

"If the firearm is so inherently evil that it causes people to commit crimes, it would be happening now," he said. "It doesn't, because the people who have their licence are so stringently checked and care so much about their sport they wouldn't allow that to happen."

Mr. Evers' collection of prohibited guns includes a Chinese AK-47 copy and an FN FAL, among others. Although they cannot be legally fired, even on a range, Mr. Evers said he still gets pleasure from them.

"It's the engineering, the history, the science that's involved," he said. "Some people collect baseball cards. They get pleasure from looking at their cards, not playing baseball."

But Mr. Evers is challenging the rules that keep him from taking his prohibited guns to the shooting range. He and several other gun owners have launched legal action over restrictions on the transportation of prohibited firearms other than pistols.

Since 2005, guns such as the Uzi or the AK-47 could be taken to gun shows or gunsmiths, but not to a range. That means there is nowhere they can be legally fired.

Mr. Evers said he believes the new restrictions were a reaction to the 2005 incident in Mayerthorpe, Alta., in which four RCMP officers were shot dead with an unregistered, prohibited rifle.

In Alberta, Mr. Tomlinson's organization is preparing its own legal challenge of the rules. He said he hopes to one day hold machine-gun shoots in the province -- the kind he used to organize twice a year before they were outlawed.

"They were very entertaining events," he said. "Nobody ever got hurt, and people learned about military history."

In one popular demonstration at the shoots, Mr. Tomlinson said, he would match up his submachine-guns against non-restricted shotguns in close-range target contests. The results, he said, dispel some myths about automatic weapons.

"The shotgun was most effective versus the submachine-gun," he said. "The full-auto finished dead last, with a worse percentage of hits."

The military purpose of full automatic fire is to make sure the enemy has his head down, not to kill them en masse. If you think about it, fully automatic fire means you run through your ammo a hell of a lot faster, and you end up with a lot more recoil. No matter what Hollywood or video games insist on, you cannot just mow people down. Watch Youtube videos of our troops fighting in Afghanistan or US soldiers in Iraq...they are firing in semi automatic mode.

Mr. Tomlinson's point is that the gun requiring only a basic firearms licence to buy outperformed the exotic weapon that only a small group can legally own.

But with prohibited rifles and machine-guns being illegal for hunting and shooting, Mr. Stamatakis, of the police association, said he doesn't think the interest of collectors is enough reason to keep the guns in circulation.

"There is an obligation to consider what's best for the public at large versus trying to appease the small number of collectors," he said, adding that he would like to see fully automatics confiscated altogether.

"To the police officer on the front lines dealing with people using those weapons while they're committing other offences -- they shouldn't be out there at all."

Always good to have a chairborne suit telling us what the people on the pointed end of the spear think. It's not like he could have a political agenda, could he now? Once again, no facts, figures or proof needed, just insinuation that our LEO's encounter legally owned machine guns on the street. There is no proof given because said proof does not exist.

He more or less comes straight out and admits that the ban on shooting them is meant to kill the prohibited class of firearms at the same time.