CUFOA
Canadian Unlicensed
Firearms Owners Association
Association canadienne des propriétaires d’armes sans permis
Constitutional
Challenges
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Press Release
Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association
The Freedom Liberation Movement
In the current climate of fear of terrorists after September 11, it may not be politically correct to call for yet another freedom movement, but that is what I am going to do. We in Canada need a movement to protect our freedoms. If we do nothing to oppose the insidious loss of our liberty that is slowly occurring as the Firearms Act is implemented, we will lose the most valuable right known to mankind: the right of self defense.
We live in one of the best countries in the world. But our politicians, people no wiser nor smarter than we, people that we elected and sent to Ottawa, arrive in that town and then begin making pronouncements about what is, or is not, a right (1). Our elected representatives are deliberately stripping us of our rights. We are told that we have no right of self defense (2), that only the police should have guns (3). These pronouncements have no basis in law. In fact these statements deny an inalienable right that no person can surrender (4). These false claims contravene the social contract that citizens have with their government (5). These false ideas are propagated as the truth, and in the Firearms Act are passed into law even though that law violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (6).
So we have arrived at a point in our national history that we as citizens must decide how we are going to live. Are we going to sit passively by while government ministers engineer our national character ? (7) Or are we going to claim our rights and defend our liberty ?
Acceptance of our loss of personal freedoms calls for no action at all. To lose our rights all we have to do is nothing.
Preserving our freedoms and rights calls for action. While political action may have saved our hides in the past, what we need now is personal action. If we as individuals do not personally accept the individual responsibility to protect our freedom, if we do not refuse to submit to this loss of liberty, we are toast.
No organization is going to save us. No political party is going to change the law. It is our individual freedom that is at stake. And individually we must take action to preserve our rights.
But before we take any action we must first decide who we are. We must decide what counts in our lives. Dr Parker J. Palmer, writing in "Change Magazine", says this happens "when individuals make an inner choice to stop leading divided lives ... Inwardly we feel one sort of imperative, but outwardly we respond to quite another. The decision to stop leading a divided life is less a strategy for altering other people's values than an uprising of the elemental need for one's own values to come to the fore."(8)
It is time for an "uprising of our values". For us the inner choice is between what we know in our hearts to be right and what current government policy tells us is acceptable. Our decision will be "a deeply personal decision, taken for the sake of personal integrity and wholeness."(8)
We must decide whether we will submissively surrender for the sake of acceptance and conformity, or whether we are going to be responsible individual and protect what matters in our lives.
Once we have decided individually to be "divided no more" we are then ready to join, not an organization, but a movement, a movement composed of like minded individuals. In our case it could be called the "Freedom Liberation Movement". And in this lies our strength. "The power of a movement lies less in attacking some enemy's untruth than in naming and claiming a truth for one's own." 8
Once we decide that we are going to remain free, once we decide that no one can deny us our rights, then we are ready to claim our truth, our freedoms.
The government has no prison strong enough for people like these.
Edward B. Hudson DVM, MS
402 Skeena Court
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
S7K 4H2
1. "... protection of life is NOT a legitimate use for a firearm in this country sir! Not! That is expressly ruled out!". - Justice Minister Allan Rock
"Canadian justice issues, a town hall meeting" Producer - Joanne Levy, Shaw cable, Calgary (403) 250-2885 Taped at the Triwood Community Centre in Calgary, 1994 December.
2. "This government does not believe that public safety is enhanced by carrying weapons. In fact, it has been a long-standing Canadian government practice to discourage the use of personal defence weapons. Once public possession of one type of weapon is condoned for personal defence, the situation of weapon possession for protection starts to spiral upwards towards more powerful and dangerous weapons." - Anne McLellan, Minister of Justice 1999 January 13, letter. As seen in CFD vol2 #819:
3. "I came to Ottawa in November with the firm belief that the only people in this country who should have guns are police officers and soldiers." - Allan Rock, Canada's Minister of Justice Maclean's "Taking Aim on Guns", 1994 April 25, page 12.
4. "An individual can neither sell nor give away his right of self-defense. This is an inalienable right." Thomas Hobbs
5. "Of the First and Second Natural Laws and of Contracts, a covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always viod. For ... no man can transfer or lay down his right of save himself from death." Thomas Hobbs
6. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms LIFE, LIBERTY AND SECURITY OF PERSON.
"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."
7. "C-68 has little to do with firearms control of crime control but is a necessary tool to begin the social re-engineering of Canada!" Liberal Senator Sharon Carstairs - Jan 26, 1996 Legal Educators Conference, Winnipeg, Manitoba
8. Divided No More A Movement Approach to Educational Reform By Parker J. Palmer http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/afc99/articles/divided.html
