Lorne Gunter itemizes some of the many, many ways that legal gun owners in Canada can be tripped up by vagaries and inconsistencies in the law:
Since Bill C-68 became the law of the land more than 15 years ago, one of the most common charges police have laid against gun owners has been for unsafe storage. The reason for this is that the federal firearms law is very unclear about what constitutes safe and unsafe storage.
Is it enough to have one’s firearms locked away in a gun safe or must they also have trigger locks installed? How secure must the safe’s lock be: strong enough to keep a thief out for two minutes? Five? Fifteen?
Is it OK to store ammunition in the same safes as guns or must bullets and shells be in separate safes from one’s firearms? Must the two safes be in separate rooms?
There are no hard-and-fast rules, so in some provinces, unsafe storage provisions have become catchalls. In Ontario, for instance, most frontline officers have been trained to lay unsafe storage charges against any gun owner whose firearm lacks a trigger lock, even if the owner had just removed the lock so he could use his firearms to defend his home or family against intruders.
These unwritten rules make self-defence next to impossible. You are permitted by law to use a gun to defend yourself and your home against an armed intruder, but you cannot remove the locks on your guns to defend your loved ones, yourself or your property unless you’re willing to be charged with unsafe storage.
Perhaps the unsafe storage rules are should be called a Catch-22 rather than a catchall.
Oddly enough, the police don’t hold themselves to the same standard that they so unevenly enforce on the citizens. According to a recent FOIA result, police forces in Canada have lost more than 400 firearms over the last three years, but no police officers have faced criminal charges or loss of their jobs over these losses. Yet another way that the police have different rules than ordinary citizens.
