Frustrated gun owners sign plywood petition and plan to take it to Ottawa

TIM COOK

EDMONTON (CP) - A new association formed by gun owners frustrated with the national firearms registry has begun collecting signatures on sheets of plywood with the intention of nailing the oblong petitions to the doors of Parliament, 24 Sussex Drive and Rideau Hall next January.

It's the latest in a long list of stunts organized to protest Liberal gun-control laws, which require all weapons to be registered in a national database by 2003.

"The nuts and bolts of the whole thing is that it's just a bad law," said Jim Turnbull, one of the founders of the Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners' Association, an offshoot of the Law-abiding Unregistered Firearms Association.

He said the plywood protest, dubbed Operation Nail-it-to-the-Door, will be peaceful, but everyone involved is willing to be arrested to prove a point.

"If they want to take a 67-year-old man, put him in jail and make a criminal out of him on this, well they can go right ahead," Turnbull said. "I will martyr myself to that point and, if they never let me out, well then I believe I am doing something for the Canadian people."

Passed in 1995, the Firearms Act has triggered protests by numerous gun groups who say the registry is just a bureaucracy and does nothing to protect Canadians.

"If it made you safer I would follow the law," said Ed Hudson, a Saskatoon veterinarian and another founding member of the association. "I follow all the laws that deal with safety.

"But there is so much in Bill C-68 that is just absolute garbage and does nothing to make you safer."

Most of the dissent lies in the West.

Earlier this year, a man from Manitoba successfully registered his soldering and heat guns in the national data base to point out how registrations are not pre-screened.

In June, the firearms processing centre in New Brunswick had to be shut down for almost a week when someone mailed two packages full of white powder to the building. Local police have said the packages came from Alberta.

"They are making noise and they are trying to draw attention to themselves, but I guess you could call this their last desperate measure," said David Austin, with the Canadian Firearms Centre in Ottawa.

"The average owner out there disassociates themselves with these groups and, you are going to find now, that the majority of Canadian hunters in the field this fall have already done everything they have to, to comply with the law."

Turnbull and Hudson said they have been gaining support for the plywood petition at gun shows across the Prairies.

Hudson said that 125 people have signed it in the first two months and the association now has about 120 dues-paying members.

"I have already burned my firearms licence as a protest and I've sent the prime minister and the firearms centre pieces of it," Hudson said. "But, I've been totally ignored."

Hudson said he believes civil disobedience is the only way to get the message across.

"Registration does nothing to make you, your wife, your daughter or your son safer, so there is no reason to register," he said.