Or was. Sort of.
When I finished high school and took a gap year, a couple of my friends did the same. Looking for a hobby to kill time and clear our minds, we joined the Stittsville gun club on Fernbank Road, just west of the village. One of my friends had a pump-action shotgun and a manual skeet launcher, and this club had a field in which we could skeet shoot.
I purchased a semi-automatic, variable-choke shotgun. It held three cartridges and was faster than my friend's pump action gun. The recoil on this weapon was also several times more powerful than my friend's gun. In an afternoon of skeet shooting, my shotgun would leave a bruise on my shoulder, where the butt rested; the next day, it would hurt to raise my arm over my head.
Both my friend and I each purchased Ruger 10-22 carbines—essentially 22-caliber rifles but with shorter barrels. The standard clip held 10 bullets; at the time, it was legal to purchase a 50-round clip, and my friend bought one. For fun, on the range, he timed me when I borrowed his larger-capacity clip and emptied it into one of the range fields, just to see how quickly I could do it (I can move my right index finger extremely quickly and the carbine fires as quickly as you can squeeze the trigger).
I emptied the magazine in 14 seconds.
The Ruger was a great target gun, and apart from the experiment with the rapid fire, I stuck to my 10-round clips. Rapid shooting was an expensive waste of ammunition.
When my friend and I learned that a gun shop in Bells Corners had a shipment of WWII guns, we rushed over to check them out. We discovered that in the cache, several 1941 Walther PPK pistols were included, complete with records. In the collection were two PPKs with custom-made, aluminium hand grips. These guns had been owned by a Berlin police officer during the war, and because the PPK was the choice of weapon by James Bond, we bought one each.
The PPK was a terrible target-shooting pistol. It was designed for close-range combat. After about 10 feet, the accuracy dropped. My PPK had a hare trigger, which meant that it was easier to pull than my friend's gun. The harder it is to pull a trigger, the less accurate your shot can become because you can pull on the whole gun as you squeeze. This meant that I got quite proficient and accurate with my PPK.
With measured reliability, I was able to hit a quarter-sized target from that 10-foot range.
I got very good at shooting all of my guns: in skeet shooting, I could stand with my back to the field, my shotgun crooked into my elbow, one handed, pointing skyward, the breech open. I would not call "pull." My friend would randomly launch the clay disk: when I heard the spring, I would spin around, bring the gun into firing position, and press the button that would close the breech and move the cartridge into the chamber. I would lock my sites on the spinning disk and pull the trigger, and watch the clay target burst into countless pieces.
With my carbine, I would fire at metal targets that hung from frames that would allow the target to swing when it was hit. I would fire fast enough so that when the target swung back down in position, I would hit it and keep it swinging. Others around the range could hear the crack-ping-crack-ping-crack-ping until my magazine ran out of ammunition.
My friend and I were members of that club for a couple of years, until girlfriends took our attention.
When the long-gun registry came into effect in Canada, in 1993, I was living with DW (though, we weren't yet married). I hadn't used my guns in years, and I considered turning them into the police, to be destroyed. I had no need of these weapons. Instead, I gave the shotgun and carbine to an uncle, who was an avid hunter, and he registered them.
Because the PPK was of historical interest to me, I kept it, locked, in a metal box. I've kept no ammunition (haven't had any since I last went to the gun club), so it was now, purely, a collectible. In time, that metal box got placed in a larger storage box and was stored with my parents while DW and I were living in South Korea.
When DW was expecting our first child, I dug out the PPK. I took a hammer and chisel to the firing pin, pulling the back half of it out of the blowback hole and bending it so that it couldn't go back in. In subsequent weeks, I removed various springs and the trigger: all that was left, when I put it back in the box and locked it, was the main frame of the gun, its breech, the empty magazine, and the custom hand grip.
The PPK has been rendered useless. I can't even put the remaining pieces completely back together so that it even appears to be a complete gun because they don't stay together. The only way that anyone could be hurt with this artifact from WWII was that if I threw it at someone. (I pulled out the PPK, yesterday, for this post: it's the first time I've held it in ages. It's now back in its box, back in pieces.)
I don't need a gun. Most Canadians don't. We certainly don't need any of the types of guns that were banned last week. And I would even argue that no one outside of police forces and military needs a handgun.
I don't say this in reaction to the tragedy that befell Nova Scotia last month. It's a belief I've had since I made the decision to give my long rifles away. I solidified that belief when I rendered my handgun unusable, in 2000.
In Canada, we don't have a right to own guns. But we do have an obligation to protect each other from the dangers that these types of weapons bring.
We don't need guns. And the needs of the many—the majority of Canadians who want tighter restrictions on guns—outweigh the needs of the few, even the law-abiding, who must now stop using these guns.
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