CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT ENCROACHMENT
CITOYENS ANTI GOUVERNEMENT ENVAHISSANT
GUN CONTROL
Pierre Lemieux has been resisting state encroachment into his private life since long before C.A.G.E. even existed. Gun control is one of the issues where he clashes with our all powerfull government.
Pierre Lemieux . Becoming the hunted
Citizen Special
Published: Thursday, November 08, 2007
The hunting season has a special flavour this year, for I am a daily criminal. No joke: my crime is potentially punishable by 10 years in jail according to the Criminal Code, as amended in 1995.
Several months ago, when my firearms licence expired, as it does every five years, I filed all the required documents but with a little tweak. I refused to answer question 6(d): "During the past two (2) years, have you experienced a divorce, a separation, a breakdown of a significant relationship, job loss or bankruptcy?" I wrote, "My love affairs are none of your business."
This is verbatim. I filled the form in English, in order to put it for everybody to see on the World Wide Web. If you are as interested in my life as the state is, check my completed form at www.pierrelemieux.org/policecanada/cafc-cfc.html.
I had provided the same answer on the similar forms I had to fill in 1995 and 2001. At that time, the bureaucrats issued my licence anyway. The bureaucrats are the Sûreté du Québec (the Québec provincial police), which administers federal firearms controls on behalf of the Canada Firearms Centre. Not that they are worse than their counterparts outside of Quebec; they are probably not.
But things have obviously changed. This time, after I submitted the renewal documents, they did not reply, nor even acknowledge receipt. I conjecture that they have become much more self-righteous and assured of their ultimate victory against our traditional liberties, now that they have a law-and-order government in Ottawa. Without a gun licence, I am now a daily criminal.
Note that the firearms licence is something different from the so called "gun registry." Even if your guns are legally registered -- indeed, especially if they are legally registered! -- you cannot keep them if you don't have the personal gun licence that expires every five years.
Hunting or walking armed in my forest, I often think of my French-Canadian ancestors and especially the coureurs des bois -- those who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, spent months travelling in the woods to trade fur with the Indians.
Some of them, like Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636-1710) and Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers (1618-1696?), were also voyagers and explorers. Returning from one of their expeditions, Radisson and Des Groseilliers were fined and saw their furs seized by the French governor. They defected to New England, where they persuaded merchants to finance them, contributing to the creation of the Hudson Bay Company. Too bad Radisson and Des Groseilliers are not with us today. They would no doubt view our rulers with the same contempt they had for the French governor. And they would not beg for a gun licence.
I live on a 24-acre piece of forest land, in the middle of nowhere: last telephone pole on an unpaved road, broadband Internet by satellite only, and just the wild forest out of my office window. But this does not change my paper crime. Even on my own land, in my own house, in my own bedroom, I cannot keep legally acquired guns without, every five years, telling the state about my love affairs, and submitting to other indignities.
They will claim their interest in my love life stems from the fear I will shoot a girlfriend, or commit suicide (as if my body did not belong to me). How altruistic of them! Strangely enough, they don't ask questions about my race, or if I am into drugs or alcohol, all of which are more important statistical factors in crime. Similarly, when granting gun licences, they don't take into consideration the fact that, compared to the general population, police officers' suicide rate is often higher, lawyers' suicide rate is six times higher, women with breast implants are three times more likely to commit suicide, and so are compulsive gamblers, say, in government casinos.
Who has any interest in my not having guns? I can think of only two sorts of guys: thugs and tyrants.
Pierre Lemieux is an economist in the Department of Management Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais.
E-mail: pierre.lemieux@uqo.ca
The following article was written by Professor Pierre Lemieux, one of Québec's leading and truly Libertarian thinkers, in the aftermath of the tragic Virginia Tech murders. As can be expected both from the author, and from the fact that C.A.G.E. has chosen to reproduce the article here, the thesis will be counter to the usual hue and cry for more state control.
Virgiana Tech
Pierre Lemieux
2007-04-16
Polytechnique (Québec), Dunblane (United Kingdom), Jonesboro (Arkansas), Columbine (Colorado), Nickel Mines (Pennsylvania), Dawson College (Québec), Virginia Tech (Blacksburg) today – what do these and several other mass killings of students and children have in common? The answer is not obvious.
What is obvious, though, is at least one factor they don’t have in common: the liberty to keep and bear arms. We have to look at the phenomenon with some time perspective. Mass killings were rare when guns were easily available, while they have been increasing as guns have become more controlled. In the early 20th century, guns were easily available to common people in all civilized countries; in many cases, individuals could freely carry them concealed. These countries included England, Canada, many parts of the U.S., and France. In fact, before the 60s, mass killings were rare.
Dunblane occurred in a society where, after seven decades on increasing gun controls, it was very difficult for a simple citizen to own guns, especially handguns, and illegal to carry them virtually anywhere. Similarly, Dawson occurred after 15 years of galloping gun control, to the point where, in Canada, it is even illegal to bear arms on your own property. Even in the U.S., which has been leading the way in the horror stories, federal gun controls have increased nearly continuously since the 1960s, and none of the massacres was committed by people who were legally allowed to have guns where there. In fact, these killings typically occur in gun-free zones.
In Blacksburg today, the tragic spectacle of tens, if not hundreds, of heavily armed policemen, with at least one armoured vehicle, all powerless to prevent a single gunman from killing and maiming more than 30 people reminds us of a dire fact: it is impossible to be totally protected against madmen, except by turning society into a convent or a jail.
One question needs to be asked, though. What if a student or a professor had been armed today at Virginia Tech? This possibility was very remote since guns are illegal on the Virginia Tech campus, and non-criminals usually try not to become criminals. At Dawson, what if the security guard who, we are told, helped some students flee and was not far from the killer had been armed? In all these tragic events, how many students wished, before dying, that they had a gun?
I am not claiming that the freedom of non-criminals to carry guns would be a panacea. Obviously, when you live in a society where madmen are intent on massacring defenceless students, including young women, there is no panacea. Yet, there must a reason why these madmen don’t go to, say, the University of Utah, where people licensed to carry guns can freely bring them on campus and in university buildings. There might be a reason why the Dawson killer, who had a car and apparently no special reason to target that specific college, did not go instead to the National Police School, about 150 kilometres from Montreal. I was there once: all students are armed.
Given this momentous phenomenon of senseless mass killings of young people, something other than the low probability of being stopped before doing much damage must be at play. Economists don’t like to think in terms of changes in preferences: after all, there is no reason to believe that mankind is intrinsically different today than it was fifty years ago. However, economists know that choices, for good or evil, are made not only on the basis of individual preferences, but also given the constraints imposed on these preferences by the social environment.
Some decades ago, most people, including unruly youths and, I would guess, even some criminals, were under certain moral constraints that they were ashamed to break. Although this is banal to say, it remains true that these moral constraints have crumbled, to be replaced by the naked force of the state. Individuals have become entitled dependents of a state that defines morality for them, besides providing for their happiness.
Another, perhaps related, hypothesis is the demise of culture. By culture, I simply mean what Marc Fumaroli (in L’État culturel, Paris, 1991) called “la culture cultivée” (learned culture): the knowledge of, and the joy of learning through, the intellectual and artistic adventure of mankind. With culture generally comes the love of life and the good things in life: wine, fine food, sex, smoking... The young illiterates who now come out of public schools seem just ripe for a nasty, brutish, and short life.
There have always been madmen who, in order to leave the only mark they could leave on history, waged destruction. Erostrates, who, in the 6th century B.C., and precisely for this reason, burned the temple of Artemis in Grece comes to mind. I wonder, though, if he would have killed schoolchildren or young women even if he had had the power to.
If I try to avoid wishful thinking and ignore what I have been fighting against for decades (and still am), my prediction is not very optimistic. Gun control and people control will grow. Individuals will become more and more infantilized. But except if the state grows from soft to hard totalitarianism, uncultured madmen will proliferate. (If hard totalitarianism comes, these uncultured madmen will man the state.) Senseless mass killings will become a permanent fixture and, after guns are outlawed, they will be committed with cars, light planes, bombs, fire, etc. And each time, the clamour will mount for more control, perhaps focussed on scapegoat minorities.
For this article and others like it, please visit Pierre Lemieux's website at:
The following article was recently (September 2006) printed in the Toronto star, and is represented here with the author’s permission, and in hopes of broadening the sober debate that this issue requires.
Kimveer Gill’s weapons were registered, but it did not stop him from killing
says Rondi Adamson
Sep. 17, 2006.
RONDI ADAMSON
I have to admit, I’ve been wrong about the gun registry in the past. I always thought that it should be scrapped, for the simple reason that criminals don’t obey the law. It turns out, however, that the registry is useless for another reason. Some criminals do obey the law, dutifully registering their guns before using them to slaughter people.
On Wednesday, at Montreal’s Dawson College, Kimveer Gill used three apparently legally registered firearms to kill (as of this writing) one person, and injure and traumatize many others. In one sense, at least, he was law-abiding. But given what he was able and willing to do with his registered weapons, how can it be argued that the registry is anything but a misuse of funds, time and energy?
Even had Gill’s weapons not been registered, what difference would that make? It isn’t paperwork that will prevent the kind of violent crime Gill committed. That kind of crime can probably never be completely prevented. Mandatory sentencing, tougher bail and parole legislation, while laudatory initiatives in terms of other crimes, would not have stopped Gill. He had no police record. Hiring more police officers, while also a good idea would most likely not have stopped him. And even sounding the alarm at the sight of his nihilistic web profile might not have helped. Were we to scrutinize every young male who posts similar ramblings (an impossibility), there would be few police left for anything else. Not to mention the crucial matter of freedom of expression, be that "expression" disturbing or not. All of this is tragic, but no less true for that. The registry of long guns, and more talk of gun control in general, came about, in part, as a reaction to the 1989 Montreal massacre. But, if anything, one could argue that the 1989 tragedy and Wednesday’s events, would more likely have been stopped earlier on, if not prevented, by
supporting the right to bear arms. Had all, or many, students and faculty at L’École Polytechnique, or Dawson College, been armed, Marc Lepine and Kimveer Gill would have been taken out quickly. I’m not suggesting Canada should be like Tombstone, Arizona. I’m arguing that it is fatuous to insist these rampage killings would be stopped by stricter gun laws. We should, after incidents such as this, ask questions. We should look for solutions, or at least improvements. But the inevitable political manipulations that take place in the aftermath of the Lepines and the Gills are dismaying. The reflexive reaction on both sides — the latte-drinking, pro-gun control urbanites, vs. what the latter view as assorted loners, rubes and crazies, is not productive.
But as a latte-drinking urbanite, who has no interest in owning a gun of any kind, I see no societal benefit to making rubes, crazies, or anyone else, register theirs.
Rondi Adamson http://wonkitties.blogspot.com
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