Unlike the United States, Canada has little in the
way of a criminal gun culture. Consider: Thirty-five
thousand Canadians have purchased $5-million
liability insurance policies from the National
Firearms Association (NFA), which cover their
legitimate gun-related activities all over North
America. Their annual premium is just $7.95. Why so
cheap? Because, as NFA president Dave Tomlinson
dryly explained in an interview, his company
virtually never receives claims. Legal gun-owners
are unusually responsible people. If they weren't,
his company would be out of business.
But the 1989
Montreal Massacre of 14 women by Marc Lepine drove
rational attitudes to guns, perhaps forever, from
the collective Canadian psyche.
Ironically, in spousal or partner killings of
Canadian women by men, guns are the culprit in only
about 25 cases per year -- this in a country of over
30 million people. Spurned men are far more likely
to kill themselves than their partners. Women are
six times as likely to be assaulted with other
weapons as with guns. Nevertheless, since the Lepine
massacre, guns have become synonymous with violence
against women, and gun control with protection for
women.
Enter the Firearms Act, which had nothing to do
with general gun crime (at a low ebb when the Act
was introduced), or actual prevention of homicidal
intent, and everything to do with appeasing
feminists' irrational fear of a frightening -- but
statistically tiny --menace.
The good guys who suffer the most are gun
collectors -- invariably men -- in the process of a
marital breakdown. For in its obsession with
protecting women, the Firearms Act now accords
spouses control over their husbands' right to renew
their licences (in principle, the control operates
bilaterally; but in reality, it almost invariably
comes down to women controlling men's renewals) and,
in many cases, the right to continued ownership of
their property.
Jeremy Swanson is a poster boy for this
phenomenon. A knowledgeable South African-born
amateur war historian and ballistics expert, he
worked as a civil servant for the War Museum in
Ottawa, whose rigorous background checks he
successfully passed. (In 1997, he was named the
museum's top employee).