September 6 , 2001

Mr. Gary Webster
Chief Executive Officer
Department of Justice
Ottawa, Canada
K1A 0H8

Sir:

Thank you for your letter of August 16. Please let me put a few points on the record.

The “goal of firearms licensing” may be “public safety” if, by “goal,” you mean the official rationalization. I suppose that there does exist busybodies who sincerely believe that by using armed men to force peaceful individuals to submit to a degrading and humiliating process, there are thereby promoting “public safety” the way they define it. But history and the social sciences teach us that the state’s rationalizations are seldom the real functional goals of its policies. The real goals achieved by your firearm “laws” (so-called) are to support the public-health industry, prepare the citizens for other controls and humiliations, and protect the state against its victims. Indeed, your own Privacy Commissioner seems to think that the questions on your forms have little to do with public safety.

When you say that you want to determine if individuals “could pose a risk to themselves or others,” you give the show away. First, it depends on who the “others” are. Posing a risk to criminals is not necessarily immoral. Posing a risk to tyrants is certainly commendable. You put criminals and tyrants on the same plane as honest citizens. Second, why would you want to protect an individual against himself? Whom does this person belong to? As John Stuart Mill said, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” If you think that this is not true, that individuals are the chattel slaves of your organization, then, indeed, you have good reasons to slowly disarm the populace.

Or perhaps you believe that the Nice State is to individuals what parents are to their children? But then, you have a little problem: How can those irresponsible idiots become enlightened enough to vote to elect the politicians who hire you? Either the privilege to vote has been granted to them by mistake, or else this privilege carries no influence at all.

We, free individuals, pay you to err on the side of liberty, not to “err on the side of caution” when this means precautionary tyranny.

Now, the fact that your intrusive questions have been asked since the 1991 so-called “law” only means that the humiliation and degradation have lasted longer. It makes them less, not more, supportable. As you would know if you listened to the noises coming from your wards, I did wage a battle against those questions in 1996 and, around that time, wrote a few articles about that.

As for your claim that your laws (so-called) have reduced crimes, you know that you have no serious research to support this. Taking your own statistics from 1977 to 1997 (the last year I have), it is true that the proportion of homicides committed with firearms has decreased from 38% to 36%, and that the proportion committed with long guns has dropped; but the proportion committed with handguns, controlled since 1934, doubled from 23% to 46%. How would you explain that?

A little exercise, now: Why isn’t the best way of reducing crime to keep every risky person in kindergarten, or in jail, for his whole life? Here is part of the answer: the crime and the violence would then be from the jailers themselves, i.e., from people like you.

I fear you do not understand what the stakes are nor in which times you are living. We are not in a situation where a benign state annoys us from time to time, and where we can be thanked for our “efforts to comply with the [firearms] legislation.” Like many peaceful individuals, I only comply with your so-called laws because your praetorians have more guns, and more powerful guns, than I. The “Canadian way” is not valid anymore when we have to submit to laws like the ones you are enforcing. We cannot accept a bureaucrat’s apologies for having humiliated and degraded us when, in fact, he tells us that he intends to continue. An apology will be welcome – indeed, required – when your so-called laws have been abolished.

Before concluding, I should like to correct what, in your letter, appears to be a misunderstanding of my position. You write: “I apologize if the questioning by officials gave the impression that they were being intrusive.” It is not the “questioning by officials” that is intrusive, but the form itself and the whole process of asking bureaucrats for their kind permission to exercise an ancestral and banal right of mine. I have nothing special to say about the “civilian” cop who phoned me, except to report our unreal conversation as I did in a recent article (reproduced at www.pierrelemieux.org/artlovers.html), and as I will do again in my upcoming Confessions d’un coureur des bois hors-la-loi (Montréal: Varia, 2001). Actually, he was probably as correct as he could be, brainwashed as he has been by his superiors.

It is to people like you, Sir, that I wish to convey my unspeakable contempt.

Sincerely,
Pierre Lemieux

P.S.: Incidentally, I am wondering why my “permis de merde” is dated July 5 while it has been issued after August 1 and has been mailed to me only on August 10, i.e., the day after the previous one had expired, and the day I had reason to believe I was an official criminal.

CC: [Name witheld: the pretorian with who phoned Pierre Lemieux on August 1, 2001 (French version)]