There seems to be a direct connection between the amount of freedom an individual has and the belief that someone is just waiting around the corner to take that freedom away.
It's rampant across all levels of Canadian society.
Take gun owners. They're all great people, whether they are collectors, hunters, sports shooters or all of the above. They are responsible individuals who take owning and using guns seriously.
Sadly, too many of them are paranoid the government will take away their guns and believe there is an organized effort by the "liberal media" and others to persecute and humiliate gun owners. That means every time the news media carry a story about the seizure of firearms, they freak out. They complain about the terminology used to describe the weapon (like this letter to the editor), they complain that they are being lumped in with gang members and they fall back to that tired old cliche that "guns don't kill people, people kill people."
The last story The Citizen published about Karl Heinz Haus, a 55-year-old local man, who is facing jail time after Prince George RCMP seized a massive haul of weapons from his home in 2013, drew 78 comments on the website. Many of the commenters insisted this was a "victimless" crime, nobody was hurt, this was basically an improper storage issue and the Canadian Firearms Act unfairly targets (pun intended) law-abiding citizens like Haus.
This is the typical clash of individual rights (the right to own guns) against the rights of society (the right for society to protect itself from people with guns).
From a legal and constitutional standpoint, however, rights is completely the wrong word. Owning a gun is a privilege, not a right in Canada, no matter what gun owners or advocacy groups like the Canadian Coaltion for Firearm Rights would like to think. Since there is no mention of firearms under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there is no constitutional protection for gun owners in Canada. It is a constitutional right in the United States, thanks to the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but even Americans recognize this right is conditional and have imposed limits on it.
Regardless of whether it's Canada or the United States, the government has the final authority to exercise soft power (passing laws) and hard power (enforcing laws).
The enforcement of the law requires either force or the threat of it. Put bluntly, the government reserves the right, through its police and its military, to point a gun at you and threaten to use it if you are disobeying the law.
What makes governments and police officers on both sides of the border uncomfortable is when citizens have the means to point a gun back. Whether it's a right or a privilege, any government that allows citizens to own firearms for any reason has already made a significant concession, reducing its own hard power and increasing the risk, however slight, of harm coming to individuals because of the increased availability of guns.
Instead of gratitude for this concession, the government gets grief.
This lack of appreciation, however, extends far beyond some gun owners. There are no enshrined rights to drive, to camp on public lands, to do whatever you want on your private land, to get rich or to get prompt service during a visit to emergency. Yet with a straight face, many people will insist they are being persecuted when their individual privilege is inconvenienced.
The worst offenders are often those with the least to complain about. Nobody cries the blues about unfair news coverage louder than politicians in office, even though news coverage helped them win the election in the first place. Nobody whines about tax rates louder than those with the most money to pay taxes, even though they use the roads, water, sewer, schools, arenas and other public institutions as much or more than anyone else.
It seems that the more freedom and privileges some people have, the more they worry about any infringement on those freedoms and privileges, however minor.
This is where welcoming refugees into our country and our communities can bring everyone back down to reality. When we look at what they've endured to escape their persecution and make it to the sanctuary of Canada, we can better realize how privileged we are, how free and fortunate we are and how silly we sound when we complain it's still not enough.
