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There is a Canadian gun culture, Mr. Martin

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Prime Minister Paul Martin and fellow-traveling anti-gun crusaders like Toronto mayor David Miller and Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty speak contemptuously of "American gun culture," as if there were no such thing as Canadian gun culture. Wrong (again) guys. There was and is gun culture in Canada. I know. I grew up in it.

As a young child in rural Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, just about every family in the communities I lived in owned a gun - usually several. One wall of my bedroom was occupied by a floor-to-ceiling pegboard mounted with firearms replicas (I would bridle if anyone called them "toys"). I wouldn't have anything that wasn't a passable likeness of a real weapon.

When we moved to a small town, I found that fewer homes there had firearms, but virtually all my male chronological peers played with toy guns. At nine or 10 we graduated to BB shot and .177 calibre air rifles powerful enough to cause property damage or personal injury, but I don't recall any of my friends seriously hurting themselves or anyone else. We had a lot of fun with those guns.

The first real handgun I held in my own hands belonged, interestingly enough, to a Baptist minister friend of the family, and there seemed nothing remarkable about that. I got my own real rifle at age 12 - a bolt-action, single-shot Winchester .22 that had belonged to my late father when he was a boy, and in turn to my older half-brother who passed it along to me. By then, we had moved back to the country, and most of the other 12-13-year-old males had .22s well, some of them semi-automatic, which could get expensive if you were into rapid- fire experimentation. We used the guns for the most part unsupervised, but again, no one in my recollection ever got hurt or hurt anyone else.

My mother being a widowed non-shooter, my .22 was the only actual firearm in our home, but the families of many of my friends kept small arsenals. The kitchen wall of one of my best buddies' home was lined with gun racks holding perhaps a dozen or so rifles and shotguns, which we were permitted to select from for "hunting" expeditions. We were actually not avid hunters, and rarely shot at any bird or animal, but it was great hiking through the woods with a gun. I particularly liked a Savage over-and-under with .22 rifle and .410 gauge shotgun barrels. There were also there larger-calibre deer rifles, but I was never much interested in deer-hunting.

So gun culture was very much of part of my Canada when I was young. Small rural communities where I lived, where the number of guns may have exceeded the number of people, were "essentially crime-free" as an RCMP officer once observed to me. Note also that these guns were in most instances not stored under lock and key, but prominently displayed in open racks, often with boxes of ammunition stored alongside.

There were few handguns around, at least on open display, what with their having been essentially banned for ordinary citizens in 1934 (Paul Martin has pledged to re-ban what is already essentially banned). One did occasionally encounter one however, often enough for me to determine that I'm a not bad handgun marksman.

I think gun culture is a positive element in society, and I know for a fact from experience that a high level of firearms ownership does not increase crime and social violence. The opposite obtains.

I still own a gun, which I gritted my teeth (pun intended) and registered several years ago. I try to be law-abiding, even if I object to the law, as I do to long gun registration. My next door neighbors on both sides have guns as well - one of them a young family in which both parents are avid hunters, bringing up their kids to like, respect, and safely handle guns, has I did with my children.

Yes, Mr. Martin, there is Canadian gun culture. A friend's university freshman daughter is an avid competitive target-shooter who has set her sights, so to speak, on representing Canada internationally, perhaps even at the Olympics, provided your handgun purge doesn't destroy her sport.

However, my own daughter, now a university senior, tells me she's the only pro- gun individual she knows of on campus. Canadian gun culture is threatened with extinction in a generation or two, another element of our heritage the Liberals (with the help of some red Tories), have vandalized and taken away.