As Cindy Lightheart said in her "Women in Danger" article in Canadian Firearms Journal Volume XV Number 4 (XV-4): "The police do not come to a woman before or during a violent crime. They come after the crime has been completed and the criminal has left the scene. It is extremely rare for a police officer to arrive in time to prevent or even interrupt a violent crime when a woman is the victim. How could he? She could not even call the police before her attacker left."
Her statement hit me hard, so I began to look into ways that a woman can protect human life from criminal violence. She may need to protect her own life, or those of her children, or someone else. But as a practical matter, how can she do it?
As a result of Ms. Lightheart's article, we published "For Women Only--the Lioness Method of Rape Prevention" in Canadian Firearms Journal XV-5. It was designed to teach a woman how to protect herself from a rapist or other attacker, using only her hands and feet and the other weapons built into her body. The Lioness Method techniques are quite sophisticated, very effective, and simple enough so that a woman can learn them just by reading and looking at the pictures.
Clearly, this is a method of protecting human life from criminal violence--but it is an inadequate method for anything other than emergency use in fairly specific circumstances. She may need something better.
She may need to carry a concealed handgun. Yes, I know that is a startling idea. No, it is not an unreasonable idea, and, yes, it is perfectly legal in Canada, if she has an authorization to carry.
Women are usually smaller and weaker than the men who attack them, rob them, rape them, and murder them. Therefore, they need a tool that equalizes the situation, and, it is to be hoped, makes them more powerful than the criminal they are dealing with.
"But--they can't do that!"
Why not? Any woman can legally carry a concealed handgun if she has been issued a Type 3 Authorization to Carry (ATC) by the appropriate firearms control bureaucrat, "to protect the life of that individual or of other individuals" [Firearms Act section 20(a)]. It's right there in the law (see Legal Corner for more legal details).
Many American women have permits to carry concealed handguns, and the structure of the state has not been damaged by American trust in women. In those states (now almost all of them) that issue such permits, violent crime rates where the victims are women went down sharply as soon as the women were allowed to have those permits. It is obvious why: the criminals became afraid of the victims.
Look at it from the criminal's point of view. He is moving in on the woman, with criminal intent. Suddenly, he is looking at the muzzle end of a handgun. What goes through his mind? "If she shoots me--even if I am only slightly wounded--I'll have to go to a hospital, and the bullet they take out of me will carry the signature of her gun. There will be no doubt at all about my guilt." After thinking that, he is almost certainly going to abandon his intentions and run like a rabbit.
Normal women do not shoot at people without clear justification, and protecting human life from criminal violence is the only legal justification in Canada. Besides, we know from the American experience that women who are allowed to carry concealed firearms are more likely to frighten an attacker away or arrest him than to shoot him.
"But--Canadian women can't arrest anyone!"
Sorry, but you're wrong. Every Canadian is authorized to arrest anyone she "finds committing an indictable offence (and threatening is an indictable offence)" or "finds committing a criminal offence on or in relation to" property in her lawful possession or custody.
So--how many women have taken advantage of this offer in the law to apply for and get ATCs? Alas, our government will not tell us how many applications have been filed--but we do know how many Type 3 ATCs have been issued since the federal Liberal Party became our government 12 years ago:
None.
Not a single one.
The bureaucrats drafted that area of law to give themselves godlike power over women who apply for Type 3 ATCs. If another type of licencing document is refused, the applicant can take the refusal to a reference hearing--but not this one. With this one, the power of the bureaucrat is absolute.
After writing this proviso into their proposed law, the bureaucrats presented it to the then Liberal Minister of Justice, Alan Rock. He either backed what they wanted to do, or was too negligent to notice what they had given him. The Liberal majority passed it in the House of Commons and in the Senate. No Liberal MP
opposed what was being done to women by this odious legislation.
We all know that there are women in danger--women who have left abusive relationships and who are being threatened or stalked because of that. Women who work in jobs that require them to leave work very late at night, who must get to their car in the employee's section of the parking garage (dark and far away). Women who must carry the day's take from the store, late at night, to the bank's deposit slot. Women who must meet strange men at acreages or houses for sale...the list is long.
So why does the federal Liberal Party refuse those women the protection they need? Why does it claim that the police will protect those women when it is glaringly obvious that a woman can call the police only after the crime has been committed and the criminal is gone, when the police do not come before or during the crime, but afterwards? Those questions are not an attack on the police. This is just real life. Police cannot and do not offer protection before the crime, and usually cannot arrive during the crime.
I do not know how you feel about this, but I am disgusted that the Liberals would do this to women. It is unjustifiable--something out of the Middle Ages--and they should be ashamed of themselves. Women deserve our respect and protection, and this policy strips women of the protection they need.
The Liberal party's attempt to disarm criminals by the use of woefully defective and hyper-expensive legislation has failed completely. Read your daily paper; are violent criminals unable to get illegal guns? No. Women need protection more than ever before, and what are the Liberals doing about it? Nothing.
Please write to (personal letters are very effective; each one is counted as 500 angry voters) or email:
Paul Martin, PM: martin.p@parl.gc.ca
Anne McLellan, DPM: mclellan.a@parl.gc.ca
Irwin Cotler, MoJ: cotler.i@parl.gc.ca
Garry Breitkreuz, MP: breitkreuz.g@parl.gc.ca
Their mailing address is (no stamp required):
House of Commons
OTTAWA ON
K1A 0A6
Tell them what you think about this situation. The first three are the people who are responsible for what the bureaucrats are doing to prevent the issuance of Type 3 ATCs to women. The law allows women to have those ATCs, but the bureaucrats are a blockage as solid as Hoover Dam.
I'm asking you to send a copy of what you write to Garry Breitkreuz so that he can tell the world about your support for women in danger.