The following excerpt is from an interview with Canadian (yes a Canadian) folk singer, and a global enviromental/peace activist Bruce Cockburn ...

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King: You are or have been a handgun enthusiast and target shooter. Can a man of peace own handguns?

Cockburn: I don't want to get into a debate about gun control. In Canada it's kind of a nonissue, because we have plenty of guns, and we don't have a gun-crime problem.

I do think the Second Amendment to your Constitution is legitimate. In the context of the time in which it was written, it was entirely appropriate to make sure the populace was not going to be a pushover for a military takeover. But that was an era when the military wasn't much better equipped than the population.

In the current context you can't outgun the authorities. They've always got bigger guns. It's about knowledge and information now. So if you want to protect your constitutional right to defend yourself, the way to do it is through having enough information that you can make sound choices, and through demonstrations of the sort we've seen against the World Trade Organization and the Iraq War. An armed response to government oppression is not effective other than as an attention getter. The thing that scares them most is people knowing the truth; otherwise they wouldn't go to such lengths to keep it from us.

Personally, I think that in a democracy the authorities should not be the only ones who are armed. The best-case scenario would be if nobody was armed. But if the cops are going to have guns, then people should have them too.

The gun-control issue can distract us from more important issues, like the environment and social justice and exploitation. These problems are complicated by the presence of weapons, and that needs to be looked at, but gun control is not the biggest issue we face.
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biLL