A major component of the rule of law is that laws apply equally to everybody and are equally enforced. With such laws, it was thought, we are protected against discriminatory laws that would criminalize large numbers of people, even if they are minorities. The ideal of the rule of law was to protect us from the state. But what happens when the state hijacks the law for its own purposes and when hundreds of thousands of peaceful individuals are criminalized by a stroke of the Governor General’s pen?

Bill S-5, the Long-Gun Registry Repeal Act, introduced by the government in the Senate, would change nothing to the "laws" that now require the arrest of at least 185,925 peaceful Canadians.

These peaceful Canadians have become criminals known to police and could be arrested any time. The Canada Gazette of March 28th states that they were “more than 183,000” of them as of January 1, 2009. One year ago, the number was “more than 150,000”. And it has increased again since January 1. In reply to an access to information request I made last month, the RCMP writes, “As of February 2009, the estimated number of expired licences holders still in possession of registered firearms is 185,925”.

A regulation proposed in the March 28th Canada Gazette would extend for a fourth year an amnesty aimed at the growing number of paper criminals known to the government because they previously held firearms licences and registered their guns. Note that the amnesty doesn’t apply to people who did not obtain the new licences required by the 1995 law, nor does it apply to owners of registered revolvers. If we add gun owners who do not benefit from the partial amnesty, the number of paper criminals is much higher than 185,925.

It is difficult to follow what is happening without grasping the complexity of the gun control law adopted in 1995 (Bill C-68). Every firearm needs to be individually registered, but its owner cannot register it without first going through the legal and intrusive loops of obtaining a personal licence. I remember the Summer of 1999 when the federal government sent students to the countryside in order to trick old gun owners into applying for special licences, called Possession Only Licences (POLs). The fact that these POLs, like ordinary firearms licences, would have to be renewed every five years, and could be revoked at any time, was carefully hidden. A large number of today’s paper criminals (131,000 according to the government) are among these victims of false representation who later neglected to renew their licences. They often don’t know that they are liable to criminal prosecution and to a maximum of five years in jail (ten years in some cases).

Neither MP Garry Breikreuz’s private Bill C-301 nor the government’s Bill S-5 would do anything for these unlicenced paper criminals. These bills would merely save licenced gun owners from the onus of registering their long guns. Indeed, we must realize that Garry Breitkreuz has betrayed us, after which ironically he was himself betrayed by Stephen Harper who put even more water in the compromise. Even if one of those two bills is adopted, the 185,925 unlicenced paper criminals will still be criminals after the amnesty is over.

So the question remains, what will the government you do with 185,925 known paper criminals, and counting? If the government does nothing, the number of paper criminals will continue to grow each time an individual neglects to renew his licence or each time a licence is revoked — because, for example, the applicant (or, should I say, “the supplicant”) has not correctly replied to a question about his love life. (I know about the latter situation, because it is exactly my own case.) Cajoling the paper criminals into obedience, as the government has been trying to do for ten years, looks like a better alternative. This is exactly the purpose, and the only purpose, of the renewed amnesty. Leviathan is desperate for voluntary submission. But it is (hopefully) not likely to work.

Arrest 200,000 peaceful Canadians, then? Or selectively persecute some of them, as the police have (still timidly) started to do, in order to scare the others into submission? The whole episode shows that it is impossible to enforce a liberticidal law with means that are consistent with a free society. One has to yield: the liberticidal law — the whole liberticidal law — or the free society. The jury is still out.