PUBLICATION:              Western Standard www.westernstandard.ca

DATE:                         2004-10-25              

SECTION:                  Gun Control          

PAGE:                         19       

SOURCE:                   Western Standard  

BYLINE:                     Marnie Ko   

PHOTO:  Gun owners say the gun registry was just the first step in the attack on their rights and that new laws regulating ammunition further limit their ability to shoot.

Gun owners say proposed ammo laws will ruin them

By Marnie Ko

Dave Tomlinson of Edmonton worries that hunters and shooters are being gradually forced to give up their sport-and-recreational firearms use. First it was the guns, says the legal committee chairman of the National Firearms Association. Now they’re coming for the ammo.

Eight years after the passage of Bill C-68—which requires all gun owners to register their weapons—into law, the federal government is proposing new regulations that aim to restrict the way gun owners load ammunition, too. In a June 21 letter sent to the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, by the explosives regulatory division of the federal department, Natural Resources Canada, chief explosives inspector and director Chris Watson outlined the proposed new explosive regulations. If implemented, many hobbyists say it will essentially make life so difficult, it will be impossible for them to continue enjoying the sport of shooting.

The regulations currently being floated are designed to restrict the way ammunition can be hand-loaded—a process in which shooters reload spent shells with gunpowder and a new charge, rather than buying new ammo. The Explosives Act prohibits ammunition to be made anywhere

except in a licensed factory, but has always included an exemption for hobbyists who hand-load. Some gun owners do it to save money. But reloading also allows real enthusiasts to fine- tune their loads for increased accuracy and precision—a must for sport competitors, many of whom experiment with different powders and weights, making reloading a hobby in itself.

The propositions outlined by Watson, however, would require that ammunition (which, by Ottawa’s definition, includes blasting explosives, dynamite, ammunition, fireworks, sparklers, road flares, rockets and propellants) could not be loaded at home. Loading would instead have to be done in a detached dwelling, located at least 15 metres from any other home. The reason, according to Watson, is that anyone accidentally igniting five kilograms of black or smokeless gunpowder could “cause a fireball several metres across,” which “would undoubtedly initiate a rapid and intense fire in a normal room.”

Tomlinson says that assertion is “undoubtedly nonsense,” since powder can’t really be “accidentally ignited” that way. In order to explode, smokeless powder must be sealed tightly in a canister or barrel and ignited. But, he notes, by requiring so much distance between dwellings, the proposed changes would make it impossible for Canadians living in urban areas to abide by the law. “That’s 45 feet,” he says. “You can’t get 45 feet away from another dwelling in the city. An average lot is 45 feet across.”

Patrick Haynes, who has been certified by the National Rifle Association to teach pistol shooting, lives in a Toronto condominium and says the rules not only discriminate between city dwellers and rural types, by making it impossible for hobbyists in highrises or dense areas to hand-load, they’re also prejudiced against Canadians of lesser means. Factory-manufactured ammunition is extremely expensive, he says, and so the new regulations will mean “less shooting, except for those who are well-off.” Essentially, says Haynes, “the feds want to make my sport more expensive and less satisfying.”

In his letter to the shooting association, Watson maintains that the aim of the additional regulations is to ensure safety. “We do not believe that residents in a multi-unit dwelling should be subject to the risk” of nearby ammunition loading, he writes. He also proposes that the rules being considered by Ottawa will ban shooters from storing more than five kilograms of propellant within a dwelling—enough, says Watson, for 1,500 shotgun shells, or about 20,000 pistol loads.

But Tomlinson disagrees. The amounts Natural Resources Canada deems reasonable take into consideration only smaller guns. Five kilograms of powder would probably only be good for about 1,200 shells for a larger sized rifle. Serious shooters can fire through that amount of powder in a single weekend, says Tomlinson, and easily spend 1,500 shot shells, while a typical skeet shooter might spend 1,000 shells over a long weekend. With some shooters out every weekend, all summer long, the amount of permissible powder would be restrictive.

The fact is, gunpowder-related accidents really aren’t that common, according to Constantin Matusoff, manager of licensing and compliance with the explosives regulator. In the past five years, there have been only two serious incidents involving gunpowder in the Ottawa area. In

one case, some powder caught fire in an apartment and damaged the kitchen in the unit directly above it. The second incident wasn’t even in a residential area at all, but in a commercial storage facility. Matusoff was unable to provide any more detail than that.

A July 8 access to information request by Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz, seeking all reports of accidents in Canada since 1995 that resulted from mishandling of explosives during ammunition reloading and improper storage and transportation of explosives by ammunition

reloaders, didn’t turn up much, either. Natural Resources Canada told Breitkreuz it needed first to consult with other departments and that he should expect to hear back in October as to whether they could even provide him with the statistics.

In the meantime, word has spread in the gun-owning community about the coming changes, and starting in August, firearms owners began inundating the federal department with letters, e-mail and faxes protesting the new rules.

Officially, the anticipated rules aren’t even available to the public. When asked to supply them, Matusoff initially referred to an editorial criticizing the changes in the gun enthusiast newsletter, Canadian Access to Firearms, which had obtained a leaked copy of the proposals. But Matusoff also added that the details as outlined in the article are “not quite correct.” He says it’s his understanding that the amount of powder that will be allowed on the “workbench”—that is,

in the home—is five kilograms, while gun owners could store an additional 10 kilograms, as long as it was stored 15 metres from other homes. Hand-loading of ammunition would have to occur three metres from neighbouring dwellings—all markedly different amounts than the numbers in Watson’s letter. Matusoff explains that all of the quantities “are uncertain and up for discussion. And while he is “aware of the need, we have not yet set a limit for the total amount of propellant that could be kept on the property.” He does admit, however, that some of the so-called safety precautions in the proposed regulations “may affect a small number of hobbyists,” noting that Canadians living in highrise apartments may be in the most precarious position when the new rules are established.

For now, Ottawa stops short of suggesting exactly how and when the new regulations might find their way into law, with Matusoff confirming only that the government is engaged in a “consultation process” with stakeholders, like the sports shooters. What’s more, while any new laws might require parliamentary assent, or at least a committee hearing, Section 119 of the Firearms Act allows for anything deemed to be a revision to become law without being vetted by either. In other words, the drafted provisions could become legally binding whenever the minister of Natural Resources decides to implement them.

Although the ministry is framing the proposals as minor revisions to an existing law, designed to protect Canadians from ammunition-related accidents, Breitkreuz says the move is yet one more attempt by the Liberal government to stop law-abiding citizens from owning guns. “They want to get rid of private gun ownership,” he says. “So only the police, military and criminals have guns.”