06 June 2007

Visit From an Old Friend

The guy on the left in the below photo stopped by the area to preach at our church this evening. I lived with him and his wife in a church-owned house (not exactly a parsonage, more of a house we set up for ministry heading out to and returning from South America) when I lived in South Florida. The man has been something of a second father to me.


But as is pertinent to a blog like this one, Fred also enjoys sport shooting--or rather, enjoyed it before he moved to Canada. As a former cop, he carried a Colt Python in .357, and while in Florida, was hoping to get hold of one for a reasonable price again.

I don't think he did, but I did sell him my SW99 and several boxes of 9mm so I could get a ticket to come out to Alaska and check things out here. After I left, he followed my lead in getting a Florida CCW (I think I was the first in my church to get one), and upgraded to a handgun in .40.

Unfortunately, he had to leave those behind when he returned to a church he used to pastor in Canada. You well know Canada's hysterical crusade against handgun ownership. So, he left his hardware with his son-in-law.

When he crossed the border into Canada, they did a background check on him, discovered he was from FL, and had a CCW. So, they asked him if he owned any handguns. He said, yes. But, as I said before, he had left them back in FL.

They tore through everything he had in their search for guns. But they didn't bother helping him put things back in order.

"It's a fantasy world they're living in," he told me at lunch this afternoon. "They think that all this fuss over gun control is going to do a thing towards cutting down crime." I then related to him an article I had read a couple of years ago regarding Ontario's finger-pointing at the U.S. for smuggling guns across the border and keeping crime rates high in that province.

But, the truth was told by a Magistrate who said that the overwhelming majority of gun-related crimes in Ontario were committed with guns stolen from Ontario homes.

Fred got a good chuckle out of that one.

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