THIS WEEK IN GUN CULTURE: DIGGING IN

No matter what your personal political inclinations are, there’s one thing everyone’s going to have to face: the Liberals will not be friends to gun owners the way the Conservative Party were.  I don’t mind saying that I personally liked the direction the Harper government was taking the country, and I liked Stephen Harper as a leader, but not everyone has firearms and the defense industry as their top priorities.  I spend a lot of time on the water here on the west coast, and I deal with a lot of gun owners who are fishermen first, gun owners second, and some of them have been pretty unhappy with what they perceive as a lack of funding for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, for example.  So I get it.  You can be a gun owner and not have firearms rights be particularly important to you.  We don’t all have to agree on everything.

But for those of us who put a premium on private firearms ownership, this new government presents some serious concerns.  There are a lot of people in the Liberal Party who have a history of making what I’d call very disturbing decisions in regards to guns.

But like it or not, that’s who we’re stuck with for the next four years, and we need to figure out ways to get through this intact.  Now is the time, therefore, to dig in.

No, I’m not talking about burying your guns.  Don’t bury your guns.  They’re too important, and often too useful, to put at risk of corrosion or loss, and gun owners aren’t the bad guys.  We shouldn’t need to be hiding anything.  No, when I say dig in, I’m talking about preparing for a serious defensive battle, which may not come…but we’ve all got to be ready if it does.

Some of you will have seen Daniel Fritter’s article on unity.  He’s right.  Unity is going to be the cornerstone of the fortress, and we need to start laying that foundation right now.  This is the moment in which we are going to make the leap from passionate individuals, to an organized force.  The only way to do that is to form a truly national organization, and there is only one contender for that title: the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.

No one else has the membership.  No one else has the funding.  No one else has their administrative ducks in enough of a row.  In short, no one else is ready.

Now I’ve already heard from some shooters who have expressed disagreement with some policy or other, or questioned a past decision, or who wanted something more, or less, like the NRA.

But this is the reality of joining a national organization: you will not get exactly what you want.  You will, however, get something that you, and all of us, desperately need: national representation.

You could wait, of course.  You could try to set up something else.  Maybe you know a couple of hundred people, and they all agree with you, and they all want to go a different route.  And maybe that seems like a lot, and in a way, it is.  I doubt I could find a dozen people that could stand to have coffee with me more than once a month, so if two hundred people want to join your team, that’s pretty spectacular.  You’re a better man than me.

But the current CSSA membership isn’t a couple of hundred.  It’s over 23,000.  Now if you can get more than 23,000 paying members in the next couple of months, maybe you should do that.  But I think you can’t.  I think that’s unrealistic.  And if you try, and if trying a new and different organization is the route everyone goes, we’ll have fifty organizations with a few dozen members each, and we are going to get steamrolled in the wake of the first criminal shooting the media decides to make famous.

We can’t allow that.  We need to get ready for legal battle, because although we don’t know exactly what’s coming, we’ve seen what happened in Australia and in England.  Like us, they had no constitutional protection, and when the government legislated against them, they weren’t ready, and they lost nearly everything.  And in Australia, the state still isn’t content.  Gun owners are losing more and more as time goes on, and it is never enough.  That is the brutal reality.

So unless you have an army in your pocket, you need to set aside your reservations and get on board.  We’re all going to have to work together now, and every oar will have to be pulled in rhythm if we want this ship to move.

Remember, you don’t go to war with the army you want.  You go to war with the army you’ve got.  We are almost certainly in the lead up to a legislative battle that will make or break Canadian firearms owners, and my Canada is not going down without a fight.

My name is Geordie Pickard, and as of today, I am a member of the CSSA.