The Great Gun Control Debate

[KJK]

I would very much like to see the actual investigative file for this one.  There is a piece missing that would make the story make sense.  Police don't ramrod totally innocent dudes for no reason. 

And yes, if you find something like a weapon on your property, don't touch it.  Call it in.  Worst that happens is it ends up being nothing.  Surely you can see how every sh*thead found with a weapon "found it last night".  For all we know, the police knew he was in possession of the gun and were going to do a door kick.  Him bringing it in didn't end up changing anything.

Oh? I think the chinese store owner that captured the shoplifter and detained him might disagree with you there.

KJK 

 

[Petard]

Getting back to the original story.. soldier getting arrested and convicted for possesion of a weapon

Personally, I think this guy is a few cards short of a full deck; why didn't he tell them over the phone what he had found? No, he walks into the police station without telling anyone why he's really there and ta-dah, hauls a sawed off shotgun out. Not smart, but besides that it looks like the law really is an ass

I read through the article again and tried to find anything else related to it, and it doesn't look like it really matters what reason the guy had for having possesion of the weapon, wether he was just some dolt that ought to of known better, or was some kind of dodgy character trying to pass off his own illegal weapon as something he just found, it seems more centered on the fact that he was in possesion of it, period. There is a very important point of law at stake here that is getting ignored and that is intent.
As the ex-soldier's lawyer pointed out, the local police had recently sent flyers that sought the public help in amongst other things reporting firearms, but nothing specifically about not handling them or how to do it. It is implied by his defence that even if you did report a firearm you better have a pretty good explanation as to how you came to find the firearm.
As the judge hearing the case pointed out, Mr Clarke had possesion of the firearm and so had no defence.
So think about that. The moment you find a firearm in the UK, you're in possession of it, and saying you just found it is not a defence against this charge because intent has nothing to do with it.
It is an interesting case to see what happens if it is appealed, which IMO it should be.

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Finding a thing in your backyard doesn't constitute possession.  Taking a thing, bringing it into your house, then going to a police station with it does constitute possession.  I think people are getting hung up on the difference between "possession" and "ownership". 

Oh? I think the chinese store owner that captured the shoplifter and detained him might disagree with you there.

I have no idea what that case is about.  What would one buy in a Chinese store anyway?

I realize everyone likes to create a boogeyman around policing, where people just are walking down the road leading 100% credible and contributing lives, only to be waylayed by some horrid bagde-Nazi that beat them half to death and created a plethora of false allegations that the poor victim had to fight in court.  I will even entertain that this could happen.  However, that isn't what we are out here to do.  My comment was specific to this case.  It really might be the case that this guy turned in a gun to a station and got locked up.  However, I am suggesting that there is more to this than what makes it into the article.  This may come as a massive shock to all who read it, but sometimes the media don't print the whole story.  I know.  It blew my mind when I heard it the first time too.  For my part, I have had at least ten people walk into the station with a firearm that they wanted to turn in.  None of them went to jail. 

 

[Loachman]

It blew my mind when I heard it the first time too.  For my part, I have had at least ten people walk into the station with a firearm that they wanted to turn in.  None of them went to jail.

The land of my birth has got a lot stupider over time, especially regarding but not limited to firearms, and there seems to be no end in site.

I would not pin this on the police involved, but the legislation itself - which the police are bound to enforce.

 

[mariomike]

I have no idea what that case is about.  What would one buy in a Chinese store anyway?

Z-C this case:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/to-catch-a-thief-in-toronto/article1351338/

It is very high profile:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/09/28/11161806-sun.html

 

[the 48th regulator]

Okay folks,

Although I was involved in the thread, I cleaned up the last few days of debating that did not contribute to the discussion.

Please let us keep on topic, and make it civil.

dileas

tess

milnet.ca staff (I will revert back to regular poster after this)

 

[Petard]

Finding a thing in your backyard doesn't constitute possession.  Taking a thing, bringing it into your house, then going to a police station with it does constitute possession.  I think people are getting hung up on the difference between "possession" and "ownership". 

I have no idea what that case is about.  What would one buy in a Chinese store anyway?

I realize everyone likes to create a boogeyman around policing, where people just are walking down the road leading 100% credible and contributing lives, only to be waylayed by some horrid bagde-Nazi that beat them half to death and created a plethora of false allegations that the poor victim had to fight in court.  I will even entertain that this could happen.  However, that isn't what we are out here to do.  My comment was specific to this case.  It really might be the case that this guy turned in a gun to a station and got locked up.  However, I am suggesting that there is more to this than what makes it into the article. 

I don't see this case as anything to do with the way the Police dealt with it. Personally I think they were being reasonable in the way they reacted; there really is something odd about someone that thinks there's nothing wrong with pulling a concealed gun out in a Police Station and not expecting there to be some kind of reaction.
Maybe he was known to the police, maybe he wasn't, as it turned out it didn't matter either way in court

I don't see it about ownership, or even how he found it (and I really don't get the Chinese store connection)

What I think is important about this case is that simple possesion is a criminal offence, wether you had just found it or you were found to be in possesion of it, the law in this case makes no distinction.
It is questionable as to what a person is supposed to do if they unexpectedly come into possesion of firearm in the UK.
Suppose he had called it in from his home after finding out what it was, would that intent not be any different than the intent behind the approach he did use (stupid as it was)

A reasonable person would expect that regardless how you found the weapon you should be able to notify authorities, without fear of prosecution, that you want to turn this firearm in. In a sense, that's what this man's intent was, his method is very questionable, but his intent was dismissed.

Why I think intent should be part of this is then the Crown would have to prove that this person was trying to dispose of his own property, not just something he found, and it would have to be revealed what evidence the police had that would lead them to believe this was the case or not; to prove that there was a criminal intent behind what he was doing.
But this isn't required, and so there really was no way to mount a defence that he did not have any criminal intent. Possesion of a firearm, by itself, regardless of how it comes into that person's possesion, is the crime.


I think the importance of this is there are a lot of gun paranoid people in this country that see nothing wrong with such a law. Is it not a chargeable offence to be in possesion of a unregistered firearm, never mind a prohibited one, regardless how you came into possesion of it?

 

[KJK]

mariomike - That is the case I was referring to. Also the Alberta rancher that is currently in trouble for his rather forceful citizens arrest last summer.

Petard and ZC - my comment was an ironic remark aimed at ZC's comment that innocent people don't get ramrodded by police. Obviously I don't blame ZC for what is happening, it just seemed well, ironic, in light of these cases.

Sorry for the hijack

KJK 

Also sorry for the late explanation, Mike's server and my computer have been arguing and it wouldn't let me post in this thread.

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

I haven't bought a gun in 25 years so I am not sure of the current system but back in the day you had to bring a restricted weapon to the police station to register it.  Mind you the very first words out of my mouth were the purpose of my visit.  Police seemed pretty comfortable with guns.  Those were the days when you could get a conveyance permit to take it to any range in the free world for a year.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

The rules have vastly changed. They are convoluted. They contradict themselves. Provincial CFOs interpret the rules differently between provinces, if they don't just make up their own. A dozen calls to the CFC will get you a dozen different answers to the same question.

The current firearms laws are not there to protect the public from criminals, they are there to entrap law abiding gun owners, get them charged, make them criminals and remove their firearms from them.

Try navigate their site and attempt to understand the archaic laws that the liebrals foisted on John Qhttp://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/index-eng.htm

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Petard and ZC - my comment was an ironic remark aimed at ZC's comment that innocent people don't get ramrodded by police. Obviously I don't blame ZC for what is happening, it just seemed well, ironic, in light of these cases.

The store owner was certainly the victim of a pile on.  That many charges seems a tad much.  However, if they pummelled the crap out of the poor crackhead, that is a problem.  When it comes down to brass tacks, the store owner really didn't have a lawful authority to arrest the dude.  What makes it even worse, he offered to let the guy pay for the goods.  Now he has entered into a civil remedy over payment.  That REALLY doesn't give him the right to put hands on the guy.  Thus, unfortunately, he was hardly "innocent".  However, I'm pretty sure that situation would have gone differently down here. 

That being said, that a normal law abiding person gets piled on for doing what they thought was right is just another sad commentary on our little slice of heaven that The Charter and its Liberal judges have created for us.  I know of at least a dozen criminals in Windsor that have over 100 criminal convictions and they still get time served (about five days) for Theft Under $5000.  In all reality, it is not against the law to steal from stores, steal cars, break into homes, businesses and garages, write bad cheques, possess child porn, touch kids, punch out your spouse (but not too bad), do drugs, sell yourself on the street, drive drunk and hurt/kill people, violate judicial orders and probation's and a whole host of other stuff. 

All the more lame that normal people who own guns get piled on so badly for minor things.  I agree that the system is out of whack. 
But YOU people keep voting the Liberals back in, so nothing is going to change 

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Came across this vid.  Seems like a pretty good sum up from a reasonable people (as long as you don't want a minaret on your house  >)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nf1OgV449g

 

[KevinB]

The more this thread continues the more I appreciate living in Florida.

 

[a_majoor]

The American experience (and why gun control is to be feared):

http://www.doczero.org/2010/03/to-keep-and-bear-arms/

To Keep and Bear Arms

Twenty-five years ago, a little after sunrise on a Monday morning, the front door of my house was kicked in by a man who had blown his mind with crack cocaine. He marched my family upstairs at gunpoint. When I reached the top of the stairs and turned around, he put the gun in my forehead and pulled the trigger.

I’ve always heard it was good to begin a composition with an arresting opening paragraph. That’s the catchiest one I can offer from an otherwise modest biography. I hope the rest of this essay lives up to the opening. I’ll do my best.

I don’t mind admitting this incident gave me a lifelong aversion to guns. I don’t have any objection to other law-abiding citizens bearing arms – in fact, I’m strongly in favor of it. It’s just not a right I have chosen to exercise, although I’m working on getting over it. I’m fascinated by the beauty and science of firearms. I rarely pass a gun magazine on the stands without flipping it open, and I love attending gun shows. My first close encounter with a gun was rather… intense, so I’m understandably nervous around them. I recently discovered I’m a remarkably good shot with a target rifle, after some friends invited me to shoot with them. I’ve decided twenty-five years is long enough to be uncomfortable around the reality of something I’ve always supported in theory.

The Second Amendment is once again in the news, as the Supreme Court considers a case that would invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to apply it to the states, striking down restrictive state and local gun-control laws… oh, wait. You’re probably wondering why I’m still here, having been shot in the head and all. Well, I got lucky. I was able to knock the gun out of the way just in time, and the bullet wound up in the wall, instead of my brain. I had managed to make a hasty call to the police as the door was being kicked in, and they arrived to find the perp and I wrestling for control of the weapon at the bottom of the stairs. No one died in my house that day.

I wish the Supreme Court would do more than rule the Second Amendment applies to the states. It’s long past time the last, ridiculous cobwebs of ambiguity were cleared away from the right to keep and bear arms. Gun control has been simmering on low heat for a while, after boiling over in the Nineties. We should clear it off the Constitutional stove altogether. We have better things to do than slip into another bitter, tedious argument about whether the government can interfere with our right, and duty, to defend ourselves.

The notion that citizens have no good reason to be armed, because the State can protect them from violent crime, is one of the most dangerous lies Big Government has fed its subjects. The government reduces crime through the police and court systems, but no matter how tirelessly the police work, there is very little chance they can actively defend you from assault. There aren’t enough of them, and there never could be. The very areas of privacy that allow us to relax with our friends and families will always be soft targets for criminals… unless we fortify them ourselves. The police arrived at my house several minutes too late to play a role in my attempted execution. They made excellent time – there happened to be a unit in the area. If things had gone a little different, they might have arrived just in time to avenge me.

Citizen access to firearms has reduced crime rates time and again, but this is more than a matter of practicality. It’s a question of principle. The people of an orderly nation surrender the business of vengeance to the government, replacing it with the rule of law. They cannot be expected to surrender the right of defense. The right to protect yourself, and your family, from injury and death is an essential part of your dignity as a free man or woman. Without the First Amendment, you are a slave. Without the Second, you are a child.

The Western nations which have abandoned this essential understanding of an individual’s right to self-defense have become rotting orphanages filled with dependent children. They’re not dealing very well with the invasion of a determined ideology that has complete confidence in its own righteousness, and few reservations about using violence to assert itself. Losing the dignity of self-defense is part of the degeneration from master of the State to its client. As this dignity fades, the people and their government speak less of responsibilities, and more of entitlements.

The Second Amendment is a concrete expression of the American birthright of independence. With the right of self-defense bargained away, our rights to speak and vote give us modest influence in a collective. The Founders wanted more, and better, for us.

Sometimes liberals sneer at the idea we might keep arms against government tyranny, because a bunch of pistol-packing Tea Party types have no chance of repeating the success of the Revolution against a modern military force. This completely misses the point. A disarmed populace has little choice but to obey orders. If the population is armed, a tyrant’s forces have to do more than just brandish their weapons… they’d have to start pulling triggers. Victory for a righteous populace would come in the military’s refusal to pull those triggers. Tyranny should never be easy. Of course, it should never come to that again, in the United States. As long as the population is armed, this is an understanding, and a duty… not an assumption.

The right to keep and bear arms is a crucial intersection of liberty and obligation. A gun owner is entrusted with the solemn duty to tend his weapons carefully and securely. In accepting this duty, we remove the destiny of our loved ones from the hands of madmen, and it is no longer measured by the distance of a friendly police car from our homes. It would be a mark of our maturity as a nation if we stopped telling ourselves that freedom can exist in the absence of responsibility… or danger. The shards of those illusions carry sharp edges, when they shatter.

The New York Times article about the case before the Supreme Court ends this way:

    The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has made clear that it is very concerned about the right to bear arms. There is another right, however, that should not get lost: the right of people, through their elected representatives, to adopt carefully drawn laws that protect them against other people’s guns.

Carefully drawn laws will not protect you from other people’s guns.  Believe me.  None of the people carefully drawing those laws will rely upon them for their protection.

 

[Ex-SHAD]

Now personally, and I may perhaps be totally out of step with modern Canadian culture, but I firmly believe that a Canadian citizen’s right to bear arms(though not explicitly stated in the Canadian Constitution) is as much an inalienable right, as is the right to free speech and a free press. A disarmed population is not a safer population; instead it simply makes it easier for delinquent elements of our society to prey upon law abiding citizens. Canadians should have a right to open carry, or concealed carry of a deadly weapon (CCDW) without having to go through the massive hassle of getting permits, and being restricted by draconian firearms laws. Firearms registration and complex firearms laws are not the answer to combating crime, but instead we need to institute harsher penalties for felonious acts, and furthermore we should bring back capital punishment.

 

[Loachman]

Yes, except for the capital punishment bit.

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Saw an article the other day talking about the division between front line police officers who think the registry is useless and the political admin types that still support it.  Anybody know where that private members bill to scrap it is at right now? 

 

[KnightShift]

I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong), that bill C-391 (the private memebers bill to eliminate the long gun registry) is still waiting to go through its third reading, here is some info on how the second reading went...

http://www.cdnshootingsports.org/2009/11/we_did_it_c391.html

 

[Loachman]

The usual suspects are making an all-out emotional effort to defend the registry in the press and lobbying MPs like crazy.

Ignatieff has promised to force his minions to vote against the bill.

His idiotic beeblings about decriminalizing failures to register are nonsense; the only way that successive governments have been able to do this are by incorporating it into criminal law, hence there can only be criminal penalties for non-compliance, wilful or otherwise. Removing sections from the criminal code would open them up to a whole range of other challenges.

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

His idiotic beeblings about decriminalizing failures to register are nonsense; the only way that successive governments have been able to do this are by incorporating it into criminal law, hence there can only be criminal penalties for non-compliance, wilful or otherwise. Removing sections from the criminal code would open them up to a whole range of other challenges.

I suspect they could have jurisdictional issues outside the criminal code.  Mind you, when was the last time the courts declared federal overstepping into provincial issues to be ultra vires?  Peace, order, and good government seems to trump almost everything.  The rest of jurisdictional issues are paid for with the federal cheque book.