A different kind of weekend.

This weekend we took the course required for a gun license in Ontario, or perhaps Canada, it's all a bit confusing. Some surprising facts about guns in Canada emerged:

Only 4% of gun related deaths in Canada are accidental and yet, in 1978, before mandatory safety courses, 151 people were killed in gun related hunting accidents in Ontario alone.

Canada's gun laws are thought repressive by some and yet it's lawful to carry a pump action shot gun with an eight shot capacity and the required ammunition in your car so long as the ammunition isn't in the gun. In fact, it's lawful to leave an "unrestricted weapon" such as a rifle or shotgun in the bed of your unattended pick up so long as you throw a blanket over it.

Handguns are "restricted" and machine guns "prohibited" but in the seventies and before there were no rules and anything owned then can lawfully be held by the then owner or his or her descendants. Some people in our class were teenagers who were inheriting a gun collection and who needed a license, whatever that collection includes is lawful in their hands so long as the mechanism on any fully automatic weapon has been mechanically limited to five shots in the magazine and one in the chamber. It's also lawful to have any number of guns so longs as each of them holds only 5+1 rounds (semi-automatic) 8+1 (pump action) 10+1 (handgun) or unlimited (rim fire). The thinking (if any) behind the law seems to be that 15 shots in one gun is a problem, fifteen guns each with one shot is a collection.

One thinks of most guns in Canada as being illegally held and smuggled in from the US and yet there are over 80,000 guns lost or stolen from permit holders in Canada and unaccounted for.

All of this was mildly worrying but nothing like as worrying as the long term gun owner who had grudgingly come to get a license. He could barely walk and had a twitch. He swung the weapons around wildly in the course of loading and unloading. He needed the proper shells and bullets for each weapon sorted out for him as, even with glasses, he couldn't read the writing on them. He wasn't just applying for a routine permit but also one for "restricted weapons", if granted his twitching hand could be holding a handgun.

In the unrestricted class we hated the lever action rifle and repeatedly "fired" it while trying to work the safety (fired in quotes as the ammunition was dummy stuff for the course). We didn't like the semi-automatic shotgun as the snapping action seemed set up to chop fingers off but we liked the bolt action WW2 era British 303 rifle and the break action shotgun. We, like everyone else, loved the pump action shotgun and ejected the shells loudly across the room. Among the handguns we were surprised at how awkward the semi-automatic was to operate, we liked the double action revolver.

There was an astonishing amount of paper to be pushed, forms, forms, forms. Earlier in the week Anna had become a permanent resident of Canada seemingly with less administivia. Anyway, the course and exams are over, we'll shortly have licenses covering all the weaponry we're ever likely to need.

The course, by the way, was in Rexdale. That made me smile as, while the area is renowned for the heavy use of firearms, one imagines that few of those fired from moving cars belong to permit holders.