willypete said:
HOLMES ::: What do you mean no guns for home defense. ???
The laws they have over there on storage and search without probable cause can make Cali look like gun country. From
http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=20
"Canada
In Canada, the Criminal Code prohibits "careless" storage of a firearm, and gives the government the authority to create storage regulations. What does this mean in practice? Consider some cases from 1996 and 1997:
Hearing suspicious sounds, perhaps from a burglar, a husband took his unloaded rifle with him one night when he looked around his house. A few days later, the wife told a friend about the incident. Aghast, the friend called the police.
The police arrived at the couple`s home and bullied their way in. Searching the home, they found the unloaded rifle under a mattress in the bedroom. No children lived in the home. The couple was charged with careless storage of a firearm.
A 67-year-old single woman ran a small boarding house in Ontario. A downstairs tenant began harassing and stalking her. Worried that the woman might pose a threat to the tenant, the police searched her apartment and found several unloaded guns in her closets. She was convicted of storage of a firearm in violation of government regulations. She had been attending school and studying to become a paralegal, but her conviction will bar her from a job in the legal field.
Recently in Winnipeg, a 72-year-old woman called a hospital to request that a visiting nurse come over and help her with some medication. Someone from the hospital asked if the woman had any firearms in the home. "Yes," she replied, "my husband has a couple of old hunting rifles down in the rec room."
The police came over immediately and began searching the home. They found several long guns, each with a trigger lock and locked to a rack in the basement. They also found a .25 caliber pistol locked in a bedroom closet, which they had broken into.
The 73-year-old husband came home in the middle of the search, and was immediately handcuffed, and accused of being violent. Other than the fact that he owned guns, there was no evidence that he was violent. (His neighbors later signed statements saying they had known him for years, and he had always been peaceful.) Eventually the police removed the handcuffs, and told the man that he had never been under arrest.
Gun storage laws sometimes provide a means for police to justify outrageously bad police work. In Medicine Hat, Alberta, a criminal who had charges pending against him tried to buy leniency by claiming that a man named Larry Davies was a marijuana dealer, with over a pound in his house. The Medicine Hat police did nothing to verify the informant`s claim, other than looking up Larry Davies` address in the phone book.
The SWAT team, apparently having nothing else to do that day, broke into the Davies household, and forced Larry Davies and three friends to the floor, pointing submachine guns at their heads. A search of the house revealed: Mrs. Davies and her newborn baby, who had come home from the hospital that day; four grams of marijuana (weighing less than a United States 25-cent piece); and a disassembled FN/FAL rifle in a basement closet.
Apparently embarrassed but not repentant about the sloppy police practices and wanton show of force, the government charged Mr. Davies with unsafe storage of a firearm. Happily, a judge threw the charges out of court, noting that whatever Mr. Davies had done was much less of a threat to society than what the police had done.
And Canadian courts have sometimes stopped other abusive prosecutions related to gun storage laws. But even then, the victim of the abusive prosecution must spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to avoid a prison sentence of up to two years.
As David Tomlinson, President of Canada`s National Firearms Association, points out, gun storage laws are unenforceable without random police searches of the home. Canada`s newest gun law, which goes into effect next year, gives the police the authority to "inspect" private homes to ensure that gun storage laws are being complied with.
Gun storage laws are like laws barring married couples from using birth control: they are unenforceable without massive government intrusions into the sanctity of the home. In 1965, the United States Supreme Court struck down a birth control ban for this very reason. (Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965)). For the same reason, privacy-minded legislators and citizens should reject turning the government into the home gun storage enforcer.
Former-President Clinton, by the way, effusively praised the new Canadian gun law (Bill C-68) which authorizes searches without probable cause."