Monday, 11 October 2004 by Pierre Lemieux

Bruce Montague's basic crime was to refuse to humbly ask for a gun owner licence, which implies answering questions like: "During the past five years, have you threatened or attempted suicide, or have you been diagnosed or treated by a medical practitioner for: depression; alcohol, drug or substance abuse; behavioural problems; or emotional problems?" and "During the past two years, have you experienced a divorce, a separation, a breakdown of a significant relationship, job loss or bankruptcy?" These obscene questions have been on the application forms since the 1990s, and a positive answer will lead to further interrogations.

If anybody had told us just a few decades ago that peaceful Canadians would have to answer these sorts of questions from the state every five years just to keep their firearms-and this is only one of the liberticidal aspects of the gun-control legislations imposed in 1991 and in 1995-most of us would not have believed it. Some would probably have boasted that "there will be a revolution."

There has been no revolution thus far, but at least a few hundred thousand Canadians have not complied and have thus been turned into peaceful criminals. Among them, a few heroes from the Canadian Unregistered Firearm Owners Association ( www.cufoa.ca ) have openly defied the "law" (so-called). The police did make a few arrests among CUFOA resisters, but under older sections of the Criminal Code, and the Crown ended up dropping the charges.

In short, and disregarding real criminals at which the prosecution has thrown the book of all applicable laws, the state has used C-68 (passed in 1995) and its 1991 predecessor law virtually only against unknown peaceful citizens who were not engaged in open civil disobedience.

This changed on Sept. 11 with the arrest of Bruce Montague who, as a CUFOA director, has participated in many civil disobedience activities. The Ontario Provincial Praetorians (called the Ontario Provincial Police in Newspeak) also arrested Bruce's wife, Donna, kept Bruce in custody, and spent the whole weekend occupying and searching the family house, from which the family was banned.

Why did Leviathan target Bruce Montague? Why not, say, Saskatchewan veterinarian Ed Hudson or miner Jack Wilson or small businessman Al Muir in Nova Scotia? Because Montague is a gunsmith and will be easier to vilify in public opinion. Moreover, he lives in a rural area, outside of Dryden, Ont., and had dynamite to blow up beaver dams. (So much dynamite wasted! Just kidding.) The sniffing praetorians found some in his fridge. As this article is finalized, there are rumours of fully automatic weapons that were so well hidden that the cops did not find them during the first search. (Mr. Montague has skills that the rest of us should learn.) Imagine how the monster will be depicted by the self-righteous apparatchiks!

Leviathan is not always stupid. It likes to target the most vulnerable victims and break the weakest link in the chain of resistance.

Barring unexpected surprises, the victimless "crimes" that Bruce Montague and his wife have been charged with are peaceful activities, in which Canadians were at liberty to engage for more than a hundred years after Confederation and for a few centuries of the French and English colonial periods. By resisting laws that violate our traditional liberties, Bruce Montague was rendering a service to all Canadians. George Orwell, the prescient author of Nineteen Eighty-four, wrote, "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."

At the time of going to press, we hope that the hero, who has been in jail for more than a week, will be released on bail pending his trial. "I am scared," his wife told me.

Even for a gentler and kinder police state, there is no way, except overt violence, to enforce laws that are unjust to, and hated by, a significant minority of the public. The liberticidal firearm controls imposed by the politicians and bureaucrats in 1977, 1991 and 1995 can only be enforced by armed praetorians terrorizing wives and occupying and searching family homes. The emperor is not naked, he's got praetorians.

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