Hi.
I am a dad. Six amazing kids and counting…
I am an accountant, legally and properly in BC Canada.
I am a husband for better or worse; sometimes she’d prefer she was single, but then again sometimes I’d prefer to be single for a week or two, alone in the bush, fishing and hunting. Only sometimes however, I mean, just look at her, the picture above doesn’t do her justice, she glows when she’s happy.
I am also subject to daily scrutiny by the RCMP on an ongoing basis until I die or my PAL (RPAL) is relinquished or revoked. (source: https://gundebate.ca/guns-canada-get/).
Here’s a picture from this morning. Exciting isn’t it? That’s my RPAL application, the background is my office floor, with filing cabinets, and such.
I can expect to wait a minimum of four months until I hear back from them. This is a paper application completed by hand and mailed from the left (West) coast to the East coast. Because it’s important, I could send it standard letter post, but choose to send it registered letter post (10x the cost) and have the proof that it was properly received by the government.
Four years ago I had to do the same thing for my standard PAL (should have taken the RPAL then and gotten it out of the way, but hindsight is always better, am I right?)
The point I am making here is that I can file a massive multinational corporation tax and financial return online in a matter of moments, and have an unofficial reply to the same in less than a week from the point I hit send. There is a chance of audit, and of course there are the standard disclaimers that allow CRA to come back on me personally (as the accountant, legal liability and all that). To form that corporation would be a matter of a few moments, a couple hours at most, online through their business portals. Once a year somebody checks to see if the mandatory reports and returns are filed. End of review and scrutiny. Easy Peasy.
To upgrade a firearms license like I am trying to do takes a full day’s attendance at an officially recognized RPAL course with a licensed instructor. (which you pay for) Then there’s the hand completed paper forms (minimum two guarantors, signatures and sign-offs from all conjugal partners you’ve had in the last few years (in my case, that’s a grand total of one awesome woman), and official photography (head shot, like a passport photo).
Once you get all that done, you have to send it all off to New Brunswick, (literally the other end of the country in my case) and wait.
Why would I do such a painful and tedious thing you ask?
For glory? For the adrenaline rush of being allowed to play with Movie Style machine guns (hint, nope, they’re prohibited, not restricted in Canada, you can’t get one if you wanted to). How about because I am afraid.
Fear is a thing, and it’s one hell of a motivator. I
See, the Liberal government took a rather back door sneaky approach and reclassified a whole whack of existing firearms, some from restricted to prohibited, some from unrestricted to prohibited. Ok, I get that sometimes reclassification happens, and there’s a tried and proven path for such a thing to happen. In a general way, the reclassification(s) is(are) proposed, reviewed, and if the evidence supports it then the reclassification is made.
This time the whole process was circumvented to accomplish some ideological policy of the current sitting government and their ambitions. I could take a left onto conspiracy lane here but with no proof or even an inclination, there’s not really much point in doing so.
The truth is that I have a pair of long guns that I bought from a friend/relation who wasn’t allowed to possess them due to an expired PAL. Then when things got weird a few years back I took possession of my father’s old guns and mom’s one antique 410, so with a bolted in hidden safe that’s triple locked against the kids and accidents, I thought things would be ok.
The problem is that two of the three sentimental family guns I took possession of (and have no intention of giving up), are only borderline this side of the general restriction clauses the OIC includes to cover anything they might have missed in their 1500+ specifics list of newly prohibited weapons.
The fear of having those long guns suddenly become anything other than what they are led me to do a rather esoteric search for my options, which are literally non-existent.
If these particular guns get re classed to restricted then I would need to be holding an RPAL at that moment. If they were to be suddenly prohibited then I would need to either surrender them (not going to happen, I have very strong feelings about the government’s right to just assume ownership of my personal property) or disable them (remove firing mechanism by a gunsmith or something). The problem with the second option is that I am not a gunsmith, nor do I know anyone who is.
Thus, while wallowing in the mire of the problem is a tried and true tactic, I am more given to doing what I can to change what I can, and leaving the rest of it in God’s hands to sort out. Thus, the search for a local licensed RPAL instructor or course had begun. Six months later I am mailing the envelope in the picture above at a total cost (so far) of just over $200 for the training, application fee, cost of the head shot, and mailing it registered post across this great (if temporarily) misguided land of ours to somebody in New Brunswick, who’s going to have to enter all the details by hand into their system and then if I am lucky, in 4-8 months I will have my upgraded license.
In the meantime, I think it’s time to teach myself to be a gunsmith if it’s not legislated in this province like everything else is. Time to go hunting for my next upgrade. Always learning after all.
Anyhow, this has been an odd and kinda unfocused post, which I’ll probably revisit later on. For now, it’s time to go to sleep and try again in the morning when I am feeling less like a potato.
Good night you amazing person, and thanks for reading this. If there’s any questions, just ask, I’ll try to answer.
Duke of Chaos
AKA
Daniel O Casey.