Published in the Western Standard, March 29, 2004, p. 16. (Also available in a jpg scan.)

Freedom, Property Rights, and a .22
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

Earlier this month, an Ontario judge acquitted two Indians (forget about political correctness, this is what my ancestors called them, when they were polite) who had been found in possession of guns without the now required licence. Reading the news item, I felt like a proud white Indian — the name that was sometimes given to the French Canadian “coureurs des bois,” my 17th- and 18th-century ancestors who spent the winter in the woods trading furs. My ancestors arrived in this land from Normandie in 1647. They were simple craftsmen, coming to a frontier, freer society. As noted by firearms historian Russell Bouchard (Les armes à feu en Nouvelle-France, Montreal, 1999), an obvious symbol of their liberty was that they could have guns. In the motherland, until the 1789 revolution, this was a right reserved to “the nobility, individuals living as nobles [les gens vivant noblement], royal justice officers, and men of war” (quoting from a Louis XV royal edict). Historically, French Canadians and Indians have been in close contact. After visiting French Canada in 1850, Henry David Thoreau did not have many good things to say about its inhabitants. He cited a French governor general, who said the Indians who were “collected in villages in the midst of the colony had not become French, but the French, who had haunted them, had become savages.” As for the French Canadians of the mid-19th century, Thoreau wrote, they “appeared to be suffering between two fires, ­ the soldiery and the priesthood” (A Yankee in Canada, 1866). I think that the author of Walden and Civil Disobedience was mistaken about our condition. In 1850, we were quite possibly as free as the Yankees, and we became and remained, in many respects, freer than they were until the mid-20th century. When I was a teenager in Quebec, we could walk on the street with rifles and go plinking on the outskirts of town where, as Thoreau said of his New England hills, “the state was nowhere to be seen.” French Canadians have owned guns without requiring any permission for more than three centuries. But in this field as in so many others, our liberties began unravelling in the 20th century. My ancestors would never have believed that, in order to renew my so-called firearms licence every five years, I would have to go through the humiliation of telling the police about my love affairs and my anguishes. Actually, I have refused to answer these questions, writing comments on the forms like, “My love affairs are none of your business.” The cops backed off and issued “my” licence. They did not want the good people to know what their law was all about. And perhaps there were a few sensible old French Canadian cops among them. The idea that the Indians would help us stop Leviathan now looks like an illusion. The two acquitted Indians do not disagree with firearms licensing, they just wanted to be spared the $60 fee, which is what the judge granted them. If some people are willing to trade their dignity for $60, I am not one of them. Even more than the descendents of the French Canadian coureurs des bois, the Indians have become wimps and state wards. Our friends in Western Canada are better allies, and the judgement rendered on March 1 by Judge D. E. Demetrick of the provincial court of Alberta is potentially more significant. Reversing a bureaucratic decision to deny a firearms licence to a woman (who happens to be an Indian, but this is immaterial here), the judge wrote that, “in the concrete jungles of urban Canada, ordinary persons sometimes urgently require a firearm for use in lawful self-protection.” This is about an essential part of our traditional liberties — not saving $60.