Please allow me to address a letter by Neal Tucker in the May 23 edition of The Telegram, in which he argued against the gun ban recently announced by the Government of Canada.
Tucker advances a number of arguments, but I will address just his principal one.
He states that the government has no right to restrict the type of property that someone owns and compares the decision to ban assault weapons to the abhorrent decision to incarcerate Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry at the start of the Second World War.
Allow me to turn his argument of human freedom on its head.
Prior to the American Civil War, southern slave owners also made the argument that governments had no right to restrict the type of property they owned — in this case, slaves. After all, they had legally purchased the slaves on the free market and needed them to run their plantations. The entire economy of the South depended on having access to this type of cheap labour, so abolishing slavery had serious consequences for those who “owned” slaves.
But Americans, as a society, decided that this type of ownership would no longer be allowed.
Society has always had to define “what is property?”
Today, for example, society is wrestling with the question of who owns a person’s genetic information. Who ends up owning the sequence of your DNA if you have your genome sequenced by a biotech company, your or the company?
After all, the sequence didn’t exist before the company analyzed it, so they have a claim on it. And if the company owns it, can it sell it to an insurance company, who might decide not to insure you if your genome shows a predisposition to a particular chronic illness?
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Personal Health Information Act was passed in 2008 to ensure that biotech companies could not use the genetic information of citizens of this province without their consent.
In other words, the provincial government decided that it is the person who owns his or her own DNA. This type of legislation was a first for Canada and is just one example of society (represented by the state) defining property rights.
The Canadian public has decided, by more than a supermajority, that assault weapons — and guns that look like them — should be banned.
Tucker is free to purchase an approved weapon to practice his favourite sport of target shooting, but he needs to realize that he is being inconvenienced, not that his rights have been violated.
Mike Clair
St. John’s
