Groups opposed to gun registration are fighting among themselves over how best to oppose the federal system.
A new group in western Alberta, the Law Abiding Unregistered Firearms Owners Association, is urging gun owners to refuse to register their guns even when all guns in Canada must be legally registered in 2003.
Until then, the organization is raising money for a “war chest” it intends to use the first time someone is charged for having an unregistered gun.
“We’re just going to tell them ‘no,’ ” said Don McMurter, a Rocky Mountain House gunsmith who helped organize the new group.
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“There is no other alternative. The politicians won’t listen to us.”
As soon as one person in 2003 is charged, all the members of the group will troop down to police stations to turn themselves in, McMurter said.
That should create a legal and political crisis, he said. The government will not be able to enforce a law thousands of people openly will not obey.
But the group’s campaign, which it claims has already brought together 1,700 members, is scoffed at by the National Firearms Association, which is also based in Alberta.
“It is silly,” said association head Dave Tomlinson in a widely broadcast e-mail.
“They do not have to register until 01 January 2003, so until that date, this is nothing but a promise to disobey the law five years from now.”
Tomlinson said his group is challenging the gun registration system in court, and “we have a good chance of having C-68 Titanic completely sunk well within a year.”
McMurter said his group doesn’t think much of the NFA’s position.
He said traditional channels of protest, such as legal challenges and demonstrations, haven’t worked and won’t work.
He called an anti-gun registration rally held last year in Ottawa the biggest demonstration in the nation’s capital ever, and yet it had no effect.
And he said the NFA’s attempts to poke holes in the system and tie it up with its own red tape won’t damage the law.
“When have you ever seen a bureaucrat go out of business in this country,” said McMurter. “They just keep working at it eight hours a day until they retire.”
McMurter said mass non-compliance is the only way to send a real shock into the system.
