Liberal Canadian Learns Gun Registry Issues First Hand

Fiorito: Is Toronto safer without my bird gun?

Published on Monday February 01, 2010

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By Joe FioritoCity Columnist

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I am and have been a supporter of the gun registry but now I'm not so sure, not when ownership of a two-bit little bird gun – legally acquired, lawfully used and stored in pieces in a trunk for the past 30 years – is sufficient reason for three cops to come to my door and snatch it, after threatening me with a search warrant.

Look, I registered the damn thing. I simply neglected to renew. A sin of omission?

Send in the troops.

An aside: as I began to write this – on the afternoon of the day the column about the gun-snatching appeared – two cop cars spent five minutes idling in front of my house. Surely a coincidence.

Another aside: the cops who came to get my gun asked if I still worked for the Star. Did they want me to write about the gun registry?

If so, there were easier ways.

As you know, if you visit this space from time to time, I am a social democrat who wears his bleeding heart on his sleeve. I believe – and have said so publicly – that the only people in the city who ought to have handguns are cops, and that nobody anywhere ought to have military-style weapons.

I also know that Parkdale is not Northern Ontario, and that Queen and Lansdowne is not Baffin Island, where I lived for five years.

On Baffin Island, people hunt with the same ease, and for the same reason, that you and I go to the supermarket. I did not hunt there because any time I wanted to I could buy a stack of caribou chops from the meat locker at the Hunters and Trappers Association in downtown Iqaluit.

I also laud the fact that, according to acting police chief Kim Derry, "more than 1,150 firearms have been seized" since March of last year, thanks to Project Safe City. "Over 70 per cent were handguns, assault rifles, machine guns or submachine guns."

I merely observe the absence of old, single-shot, 20-gauge bird guns on that list.

And here's a note from a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces who spent more than 15 years as a military policeman:

"Had you decided not to be intimidated by the police and refused to cooperate, your home would have been invaded by the police with a warrant and ransacked until the offending firearm was found and then you would have been charged under a number of breaches of the Firearms Act. Your life would then have been turned upside down, brought to the brink of bankruptcy by exorbitant legal fees and (you would have) faced up to 10 years in prison, all for having an attitude and not having a licence for a duck gun."

I plan to do what is necessary to retrieve my shotgun.

The before and after?

Before, I had a gun with no ammunition locked up in my basement. After, I'll have a gun with no ammo locked up in my basement. In between there was nastiness.

I still fail to see how the city is safer.

A final aside: Officer N., the cop with the sneer, said as he was leaving that some sort of understanding might have been reached but not with a guy like me. All he knows about a guy like me is that I have a sharp tongue when I'm being bullied. If that's all he knows, he doesn't read the papers much.

If there was some sort of understanding to be had, why was that not put to me from the start, in which case my reaction might well have been sweeter?

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/758486--fiorito-is-toronto-safer-without-my-bird-gun