Canadian Cincinnatus

Once again, our right to self-defense is under attack by the Province of Ontario

In March of this year, Ontario’s crown prosecutors persecuted Ian Thompson of Welland for the crime of defending himself against multiple armed attackers who assaulted his house in the wee hours of the morning. Mr. Thompson’s sin was that he used a gun to defend himself and his property (which was being firebombed). I wrote about it here and here. The result was a legal nightmare for Ian Thompson, that I had thought he had won, thanks to public pressure that gun rights activists had brought to bear on this case.

But I now hear from Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, Ed Burlew, that the persecution still lingers to this day. According to Mr. Burlew, “The charges of weapons dangerous and careless use were dropped. However, the crown is still prosecuting Mr. Thompson on the charges of careless storage of the firearms and a two-day trial is scheduled for January 30 and 31.”

If you know anything about Canadian gun law in, you will know that careless storage is the catchall charge that the cops use to go after gun owners if they want to get them when they haven’t done anything wrong. Any reasonable prosecutor would have dropped the matter completely when the careless use charges were dropped. Of course, any reasonable prosecutor would not have pursued this outrageous matter in the first place. What is happening is that an obstinate persecutor is going after Mr. Thompson out of spite.

His lawyer, Ed Burlew, is appealing for donations again, as Mr. Thompson is (or was) unemployed and is therefore not wealthy. I have mailed in my cheque. To see how you can help Mr. Thompson (and help protect our right to defend ourselves), please call Ed Burlew’s office at 905-882-2422.

 

Call for right to bear arms in UK after riots

This comment from the Telegraph’s Nile Gardiner:

“During the Los Angeles riots in 1992, many store owners in the south central part of the city defended their property against marauding gangs with their own weapons... And across the country, Americans admired their bravery, thankful for the Second Amendment to the US Constitution which protects their right to keep and bear arms, and thereby defend themselves, their families and their property. In contrast in London in 2011, shopkeepers were left at the mercy of feral, brutal thugs acting with impunity across whole swathes of the capital as the police were overwhelmed. If they had the right to bear arms and defend their stores with force, it would have been a very different story, and brutal looters would have met firm resistance.

Britain’s gun laws are among the most draconian in the world, yet the nation has some of the highest levels of violent crime and burglary in the West, and there is no shortage of gun crime in major cities such as London and Manchester. While criminal gangs are often able to acquire firearms on the black market, ordinary law-abiding British citizens are barred from owning guns for self-defence.” 

Remember, the right to keep and bear arms has little to do with punching holes in paper targets or shooting ducks. It is about the most basic human right of all: the right to defend yourself, your family and your property.

At stake is whether you are a free man or a pawn.

 

The right of Canadians to self-defence under attack again by our legal system

Peter Worthington relays another tale of outrage perpetrated by the Canadian legal system on an honest citizen:

The Chen case pales before the most recent incident in Toronto, where a guy escorting his girlfriend to her home at night, found signs of a break-end-enter, and checked out the house.

He found a burglar hiding, and in the ensuing fight the interloper was stabbed several times and ran away. He was admitted to hospital, but was not charged.

When the police eventually arrived, the guy who fought with the burglar was charged with “aggravated assault” — using unreasonable force by stabbing the guy.

If found guilty — as unlikely is this case — he could get 14 years. 

This is nuts.

This is nuts. And it is indicative of the contempt that the ruling classes have for the average citizen.

If asked why they are so hostile to the right of self defence, doubtlessly the cops and lawyers inhabiting our legal system would cite a fear of vigilantism, ‘street justice’ and kangaroo courts.

This is contrary to the experience in the US where the only measurable result when “castle laws” are introduced is that the crime rate drops. It seems that criminals are opportunists who discount the future heavily. They are looking for an easy buck and the prospect of facing physical resistance right now weighs much more heavily on their minds than the possible prospect of a prison sentence a year or so from now.

In contrast, the motivation of the legal system apparatchiks is a combination of paternalistic arrogance (“we know what’s best for you”), fear of job security (“hey! that’s my job, not yours”) and an ambient socialist pose that is so omnipresent that it is not even acknowledged by those afflicted by it.

In reality, the right to self-defence is our most basic right, even more basic than freedom of speech (and I am a big proponent of freedom of speech). If we aren’t allowed to even defend ourselves, what in blazes have we allowed ourselves to become?

 

The Galliano trial in France is an outrageous assault on free speech

Let me be clear about one thing: I find John Galliano to be a disgusting person - on many different levels. But that is no reason to take away his right to free speech. Currently in Paris, he is being tried for making an anti-Semitic rant in a restaurant. If guilty, he can be fined or thrown in jail. This is an abomination. 

If the plaintiffs found what he said to be offensive, they could have asked the restaurant to throw him out for rudeness. And that would be fine. Just because you have a right to free speech doesn’t mean that there is an onus on others to put up with your behaviour. And if the restaurant had chosen to ignore the matter, that should have been OK from a legal perspective because, at the end of the day, it was a private matter.

Free speech is one of the most sacred rights in a free country because it allows ideas and thoughts to be debated – and officials in the government, media and academia to be criticized. When this right is proscribed, then it means some government entity or commission has to be put in charge of classifying what speech is permissible and which isn’t. And when you have that, society is no longer free.

Of course, in his rant, Galliano also said things like, “I will kill you.” As it is widely understood by legal theory and precedent, threats of violence are not considered protected speech. For this reason, if the authorities had prosecuted Galliano on the criminal charge of uttering death threats, I would have had no problem with that. There would have been no free speech issue because political speech was not being imperilled. To remain a free society, it is precisely political speech that must be protected (which, incidentally, is why campaign finance laws are a bad thing). 

On a positive side, Geert Wilders was acquitted of hate speech. At least, freedom is winning somewhere.

Two Maryland teens get charged with a hate crime, but not the hate crime that they actually committed

According to this Fox News story, the two black teenage girls who viciously beat a white transsexual woman in a Maryland McDonalds last month are being charged with a hate crime in addition to assault. A cell phone video of the protracted beating ended up on the internet, generating widespread revulsion and disgust after Drudge linked to it. One thing is for sure: after viewing it, there is no way you can conclude that the principal alleged attacker is “a very nice young lady” as her lawyer describes her.

The attackers were black and the victim is white. Therefore it is possible that anti-white racism was at least a partial motive. Indeed, the police have charged the two ‘nice young ladies’ with a hate crime, but not for an anti-white hate crime but for an anti-gay hate crime. I have my doubts about the police’s own motive in the decision.

From the video, anti-white racism is strongly suggested. I think this was why people reacted to it the way they did. I think the cops wanted to charge her with an anti-white hate crime but racial politics in Maryland and political correctness in general gave them second thoughts. I think when it came out that the victim was transgendered, everybody seized on that because it is a safe, uncontroversial motive for a hate crime. 

Why do I think this? Partly from the video, where the victim looks like a white woman. I was certainly clued out about the victim’s transgendered status when I first saw it and I think the perpetrators were as well. Consider the fact that just prior to the assault, the ‘nice young lady’ had accused the victim of ‘looking at her man’. This suggests sexual jealously as one motive. Would the lead attacker be as jealous of a transsexual looking at her man as she would of a white woman? I strongly doubt it. If she had been aware of the victim’s sexual status, I think the ‘nice lady’ probably would have just contemptuously laughed at her, secure in the knowledge that ‘her man’ wouldn’t be tempted.

All of which illustrates the folly of hate crime as a legal concept - the reason why I bring the whole incident up in the first place. While I think part of the reason white people reacted to the video as strongly as they did was because they felt personally threatened by what they saw (“Hey! That could happen to me!”), what difference should that make to the court proceedings? The fact is, aggravated assault is an ugly thing - regardless of the motive. Would it have been any less ugly if the victim had the same sex and skin colour as the attackers? Doubtlessly the video would have been less controversial, but the harm inflicted would have been the same.

All the hate crime angle does is inject grievance politics and increasingly convoluted PC metaphysics (‘How many holocaust deniers can dance on the head of a pin?’) into what is really (or what should be) a straightforward criminal matter. The sex and skin of the participants should be irrelevant to the prosecutors - except in determining motive. 

 

The right to self-defense is the citizen’s most important right

Many people, especially liberals make the claim that the right to free speech is our most important right. Others believe it is freedom of the press. Still others assert freedom of assembly, or the right to free elections. In contrast, I assert that as important and fundamental as those rights are, there is one right more fundamental still, and that is a right to self-defense.

This right, or rather, the absence of this right is illustrated by the Ian Thomson case. As I detailed in a post a couple of weeks ago, Ian Thomson is an unemployed person living in Port Colborne who woke up early last August 22 to what he thought were gunshots. They turned out to be not gunshots but explosions from Molotov cocktails that were thrown into his house by three armed thugs. While assaulting him with deadly force, they yelled death threats at him to get him to stay inside and burn to death. Most properly it can be said that Ian Thomson’s life was in deadly danger.

To respond, he grabbed a handgun that was legally registered to him and stored in accordance with the Firearm Act’s safe storage requirements and proceeded outside to face God knows what. He fired three warning shots at his would-be murders and they fled. For his troubles, the cops charged him with “unsafe use of a firearm,” “pointing a firearm” and “careless storage of a firearm”.  

Apparently the Crown Prosecutors thinks what Ian Thomson did was wrong. I ask, so what is Ian Thomson supposed to have done? Is it his duty as a Canadian citizen to throw himself at the mercy of firebombers? And if they decide to not be merciful is it his duty to let his murderers kill him? Or is he allowed to resist, but only after every option for defending himself is no longer possible? Hey, Mr. Prosecutor! Isn’t that too late?

From this case, and from the David Chen case last fall, it is clear that our prosecutors’ answers to the above question are: submit, yes, yes, yes and yes. As I said about the David Chen affair, “Public safety is not the main motivating factor in the police department’s disapproval. Rather, cops don’t like spontaneous citizen action because it infringes on their monopoly on force. They look at citizen arrests the way unionized city garbagemen view private contractors who haul away the trash for less money.” 

It can be seen that, from Ian Thomson’s point of view at 6 AM on August 22, his right to self-defense trumped his right to say what he wanted, operate a printing press, assemble in a crowd or elect a city councillor. We must understand that the difference between Ian Thomson and any one of us is circumstances, at least if the prosecutors – theoretically our servants – have their way. We are all Ian Thomson because if he loses his case, we will live in a country where it is everybody’s duty to be a victim. And if you are about to be a murder victim, who cares about anything else?

Columnist Lorne Gunther has related thoughts.

There is a rally to support Ian Thomson tomorrow put on by the Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA). The following is copied from the CSSA press release.

“CSSA members are encouraged to attend a rally of support for Ian Thomson on March 2nd at 9:00 a.m. in Welland, ON. Mr. Thomson (of Welland) was recently charged with numerous firearms offences when he defended himself again three masked men throwing Molotov cocktails at his home and dog house. While Mr. Thomson was not injured, one of his dogs suffered burns.  CSSA General Counsel and noted firearms lawyer Edward L. Burlew LL.B., is defending Thomson. If you feel Canadians must be allowed to protect their own safety and property without being forced to defend themselves against criminal charges, come and show your support. The rally will be held at the Welland Court House, 102 East Main Street, Welland, Ontario L3B 3W6 and all caring citizens are encouraged to participate.”

As I already mentioned in my last article on this subject, Mr. Thomson has now been reduced to poverty by this persecution. For this reason, Mr. Thomson’s lawyer, Ed Burlew is urgently soliciting donations for Mr. Thomson’s defense. Details of how you can help out can be found by calling Mr. Burlew’s office at 1-888-486-5677.