Risky Business

4. The Aims of NFA are:

4.1. to promote, support, and protect all safe recreational firearms activities,

4.2. to promote, support, and protect all educational firearms activities,

4.3. to promote natural justice for all firearms activities, and

4.4. to serve and inform responsible owners and users of recreational firearms.

Those four aims are the basis of the NFA. They define how and where the NFA can spend money, and on what. They allow the NFA to operate in many areas, doing many things--for your benefit. We support court cases, supply expertise, and send expert witnesses under 4.3 whenever someone is in trouble with our abusive C-68 gun control system. We do a lot of educating under 4.2, a lot of political pushing under 4.1, and a lot of publishing on paper and the internet under 4.4.

Okay, So What Do We Have the National Firearms Association For?


This is a personal letter from your National President to you:

In 1984, I was a prime mover in setting up the National Firearms Association. In the years since, the NFA has pursued clear aims and helped many thousands of firearm owners. From 1984 to 2006, firearms laws became steadily more abusive. More and more people who had done nothing that anyone would see as wrong were charged with criminal offences due to poor paperwork skills.

The NFA gained a formidable reputation for legal expertise, and many lawyers now routinely call the NFA when they get a case involving a firearm. Example:

"My client is charged with careless storage of a firearm in his car."

"Congratulations. He's not guilty."

"No, you don't understand. He put his shotgun in the trunk, forgot about it, and the car hasn't moved for six months."

"No, you don't understand. It is not possible to store a firearm in anything with wheels. At all times, the firearm was being 'transported in an unattended vehicle.' There is a regulation covering that, and no storage regulation applies in this case. There are regulations covering transport and regulations covering storage. They're different, so only one set of regulations can apply. In this case, it is the transport regulations."

"Er...the car wasn't locked."

"That's okay, as long as they don't change the charge before the trial. He violated a transport regulation by not locking the car--but that's not what he's charged with, so he's innocent."

"Gee, Dave, does doing this ever make your head hurt?"

"Sure. Take another case. The client was charged with possession of a 'prohibited weapon'--a snub-nosed .38 revolver--under Criminal Code section 91(2). I briefed the lawyer, and when the charge was read, she popped up and asked the judge for an immediate dismissal of the case, because a 'prohibited weapon' cannot be a firearm. The judge dismissed the case."

I remember a case from the mid-1980s. The client had a deactivated .50-calibre Browning machine gun (a DEWAT) set up in his living room. He was charged with possession of a prohibited weapon (prohibited weapons could be firearms until 1998), so I sent an affidavit explaining that a deactivated firearm was not a "firearm" in law.

A few weeks later, he called again. The police had gone to Customs and asked if .50-calibre Brownings had ever been legally imported into Canada. The Customs officers confidently said Customs would never have allowed one in, so they laid a new charge of smuggling the gun into Canada.

I wrote another affidavit, explaining how many .50-calibre Brownings were taken from the bellies of Canadian CF-100 jet fighters and Canadian CF-86 Sabre jet fighters, and older Canadian F-51 Mustang piston fighters--and sold to scrap dealers who recycled them to dealers, who recycled them to collectors.

They finally dropped the charges, and gave him back his deactivated war trophy (that's what DEWAT stands for). I received an ecstatic letter from the young collector, and it included this: "When all those cops burst into my home, I was terrified. They were totally out of control, very excited, guns in their hands... I don't know what they would have done if they had found the other six Browning .50s in my garage!"

We've kept our courtroom activity quiet, because doing so let the Crown prosecutors think that when they lost a case it was just because they had run into a smart lawyer. Now they have figured out where the "smart" is coming from (it took them only 22 years!), so we're coming out into the open. We can and will change the face of Canadian law--one court case at a time!

This new government also needs a lesson regarding the strength and commitment of the firearm community, so the NFA is going to teach you how to use a letterstorm.

"What in H___ is a letterstorm?"

It is a very powerful technique for impressing politicians. Every letter you send to a Minister in Ottawa is counted as the voice of 500 angry voters.

"So?"

OK, you're going to be a politician for a moment. A 200-letter letterstorm lands on your desk. How many angry voters does that represent?

"Er...200 times 500... my God, that's 100,000 angry voters! I bet any politician would pay attention to that!"

So would I. This year, the NFA is going into high gear. We finally have a friendly (but somewhat reluctant) government to work with. We're going into massive recruitment. We're going to be the most powerful political force this country has seen in years. We're going to bury them in letterstorms. We're going to beat the crap out of the firearms control bureaucrats in the courts. We're going to change the face of Canada by changing the abusive laws we've been living under.

Are you with me?

We do a lot here at national headquarters, but we can't do things alone. We need your help and support, which we thank you for. The latest fundraising effort was very successful, and many of you are already responding to our request that you write to Ministers and the Prime Minister. Together, you out there across Canada and we here in the office, we can move mountains.

Read this carefully, and THINK about it. I often ask you to write a personal letter to Stephen Harper, PM, Vic Toews, Minister of Justice, and Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety. Their address is House of Commons, OTTAWA ON, K1A 0A6, and you don't even have to put a stamp on the letter.

Back in 1991, just one person had a very powerful effect just by being persistent. By constantly telling Kim Campbell that the news media were totally in favor of more severe gun control, he managed to push her into enacting the severe gun control law of 1991.

He had the advantage of a media that had never seen the effect of severe gun control legislation. You have the advantage that it has now been conclusively proved that severe gun control laws do not reduce violent crime levels--they increase them. They do that by taking firearms away from law-abiding firearm owners, and taking no guns away from any criminal. They do that by giving to every violent criminal a government guarantee of his personal safety while he is committing any type of violent crime. Every criminal knows that his victim believes he cannot legally use a firearm for the purpose of protecting human life from criminal violence--but the criminal can and does use firearms to commit crimes.

You can have the same power, because every letter you write is counted in Ottawa as the voice of 500 angry voters. You have clout--if you know how to apply it.

Severe gun control laws do not bother violent criminals, who just ignore them. If a criminal is willing to violate the laws that forbid rape, robbery, and/or murder, why on earth would anyone be stupid enough to think he can be deterred or controlled by a gun control law?

Before we had severe gun control laws, we had practically no drive-by shootings, no bar shootings, no home invasion criminals smashing their way into occupied homes. Now, criminals who trust the government guarantee of their own safety commit all those crimes, and more.

Firearms are for more than just sport. Governments and anti-gun people have been claiming for years that we do not need firearms, because they are "just for sport, and no one needs sport!"

The NFA is pushing the new Conservative government to actually issue concealed carry permits to women in danger. That is a first step toward sensible gun control laws--and it's a big one. We can get this --and more beyond--if you will write letters to our three target Ministers and will keep on writing them. One of our prime objectives in demanding this is to force recognition that possession of a firearm can mean the difference between death through criminal violence and a criminal being arrested by his proposed victim. Yes, that can happen! And does­, in countries with sensible laws.

The other major firearms organizations in Canada say we cannot get this, so they refuse to ask for it. I have news for them--very old news--"You cannot get anything you don't ask for!"

A series of Canadian governments have brainwashed Canadian voters. The voters have been taught to leave protection of human life from criminal violence to the police--who cannot and do not arrive until the crime has been completed and the criminal has departed. That is not a criticism of the police, it is a result of the fact that the victim cannot call police until the criminal departs. If the victim is dead, the police will arrive even later.

Most women are physically weaker than most of the criminals who attack them. That's not a criticism, it's just a fact. There is a difference between the force that he can apply and the force that she can apply.

When a crime is being committed, there is usually no one there but the criminal and the victim. If the victim cannot protect her own life from his criminal violence, she will be nothing but another bad statistic. If she is able to call the police after he has departed, the police will begin a long and often difficult tail chase. They may or may not catch up with the criminal.

Like you, I have been disappointed to see that the new government is not taking the new problems of Canada seriously. It is trying to maintain the status quo, to not rock the boat. Politically, that's working--my daily paper told me today that if an election is held, the Conservatives will win a majority of the seats in the federal Parliament. What it is not doing is ensuring the safety of Canadian women. This government's behaviour, so far, is not a solution to the problem of escalating criminal violence in our society. That solution, if the Conservatives have one in mind, has been deferred, probably for a year or more.

Is there an interim solution for a woman who believes that she is in danger? Yes, there is, but it is a dangerous solution. In our article, "Constitutional Defences " (Canadian Firearms Journal Vol. XVI, No. 1), the NFA stated its belief that it is (or should be) illegal to convict a woman of possession of a firearm without a registration certificate and/or without a firearms licence. In our article, "Protecting Human Life From Criminal Violence "(Canadian Firearms Journal Vol. XV, No. 6), the NFA explained the rules for using force to protect human life from criminal violence legally.

If a woman has read both those articles, she will know that she can apparently carry a handgun (apparently illegally), without breaking any valid law. These defences have not been tested in a court of law, but several such cases have been dealt with by NFA assistance and advice. In each case, the charge has been dropped. That apparently happened because few Crown prosecutors want to be the person responsible when a major section of the Criminal Code is voided, when it is blown clear out of the law by having one or more sections of the Criminal Code struck down by a judge.

I cannot guarantee that this defence will work. Too much depends on exactly which judge and which Crown prosecutor handles the case, and which jury hears it. I can say that it has worked (causing the charge to be dropped before it even got into court) ten times so far. However, a dropped charge sets no precedent that we can bring up in a later court case. It is legally useless.

Is this situation murky and confused? It certainly is. I can say this much: if a woman (or a man, for that matter) is charged with carrying a handgun illegally, or even using one to protect human life from criminal violence, there are apparently valid defences. What will happen in a court of law when those defences are finally presented (by the lawyer acting for the accused) is not predictable--but a "not guilty" verdict is distinctly probable.

From personal knowledge, I know that a couple of female Crown prosecutors are carrying concealed handguns on a daily basis, including into court, to protect human life from criminal violence. The law appears to say that what they are doing is illegal, but they value their lives. They do not agree that women should be defenceless.

There is only a slight chance that what they are doing will be detected and they will be charged. There is a good chance that if what they are doing is detected, and they are charged, that the NFA information will result in their being found "not guilty," and the law being struck down. Their bet on the NFA defence is reasonable, especially because Canadian juries are very reluctant to condemn a woman who was only protecting human life from criminal violence. That is true for nearly all women in such circumstances.

If you are a woman, should you be carrying a handgun "illegally"? I can't answer that. I can say: "Don't do it if you are going to carry it while drunk or stoned. Don't do it if you have an uncontrollable temper." If you do decide to do it, be prepared to be caught. Be prepared with your defences. Do NOT explain what happened until you have your lawyer's advice, and do not answer any police questions. Note that many lawyers have very poor knowledge of firearms and protection of human life from criminal violence laws, as they rarely come up. Talk to the NFA before making any major decisions. You have a right to silence, and you are a fool if you give up that right. More people are convicted by way of a statement made to police, or police questions that they answered, than for any other reasons.

If you are in trouble over any matter involving firearms, call 1-780-439-1394 or email info@nfa.ca before you say anything to the police. Even lawyers can err in handling such a case, because so few lawyers have the depth of experience that the NFA office does. We can help, and we do--at no charge, under 4.3.