Is it fair to speak of the firearms community in the same way as racial and religious communities, and to demand that they receive the same respect and legal protection?

Absolutely. There are two steps to understanding why. First, it is easy to show that firearms owners quite demonstrably form a community. Second, there is no reason to privilege racial and religious communities over any other community of law-abiding citizens, including firearms owners. That they often are so privileged is an anachronism, a historical anomaly with no rational basis today.

So, do firearms owners comprise a community? Clearly they do. There are several definitions of community in the Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary I keep by my desk, but all share the key element of being a body of persons with some common interest or characteristic. Firearms owners not only have their own distinguishing characteristic, firearms ownership, they have their own history, organizations, celebrations, rituals, heroes and belief systems to tie them together. Of course they are not a purely homogeneous group. Hunters, antique duelling pistol collectors, and Olympic trap shooting competitors are all in some ways quite different from one another. But then again, so are Catholics, Egyptian Copts, black southern Baptists and United Church of Canada members, and no one disputes that they are all part of the community we call Christians (well, actually Christians frequently dispute whether others deserve to call themselves by that appellation, but those looking in from outside seldom do). The key point is that there is no need for unanimity or uniformity to be considered a community.

OK, so maybe firearms owners meet a dictionary definition of a community, but surely it is offensive to even speak of them in the same breath as religious or racial communities. The latter are surely more deserving of respect and legitimacy, aren’t they? Isn’t the enshrinement of their status as legally protected groups in various constitutions and Bills of Rights ample evidence of that? Well, no.

There was once a time when people based their identity primarily on their ethnicity or their religion, often with considerable overlap between the two (e.g. Anglicanism among the English, Romanian Orthodoxy among Romanians, etc.). The privileging of ethnic religious identities is a remnant of those bygone days. In today’s world, however, religion plays a rapidly diminishing role in all parts of the developed world except for some regions of the United States, and ethnicity has become blurred with widespread immigration. Fifty years ago, with few exceptions looking “Canadian” meant being white, and probably kind of pasty from our wintry climate. Nowadays, however, the term is meaningless. Well, maybe it might suggest wearing a toque with a Tim Hortons logo, or half a watermelon on your head if you’re in Saskatchewan in the fall. But whatever the headgear, the person underneath it could be of any colour in the rainbow, and look just as “Canadian”. Now we tend to base our identities on other things, and the identity of “firearms owner” is just as legitimate a basis as any of the other ways that people use to differentiate themselves and form an identity.

Really? Does this not trivialize the notion of identity? Not at all. I belong to many communities, based on my profession, place of residence, and other characteristics, but there is no doubt in my mind that the one that means the most to me, the community with which I identify most strongly, is the firearms community. There is nowhere I feel safer and more at home than at a gathering of my fellow firearms owners, whether at a gun show, a shooting competition, an auction, or at the range. Of course, membership in this community means different things to different people, but so does religious identity. Some members of a religious group may feel a personal need to wear some form of headgear or other mark of their faith, even if it is not explicitly required by their holy scriptures, whatever they may be, and these personal interpretations have been found to be protected by law. If I feel a deep philosophical conviction that I have a right to own a machine gun or to carry a handgun for personal protection, and being legally prevented from doing so causes me personal anguish, is that any different from the anguish of a Moslem woman denied the right to wear a hijab, or a Sikh denied the right to wear a turban or carry a kirpan? How dare anyone presume to suggest that my suffering is less? How do they know how deeply I feel?

The foregoing should not be taken as suggesting that any racial, religious or ethnic group should be denied the right of self-expression. Rather, it is to argue that the firearms community has at least an equally strong case for its rights and freedoms to be respected. We are a group that is exemplary in every way, with exceptionally low levels of criminality and strong contributions to the public interest. If we, of all people, are not allowed the freedom of our convictions, does this not jeopardize the basis for protecting those whose conduct is less uniformly outstanding? There are a lot of people living in glass houses who should think carefully about the implications of casting too many stones.

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