TITLE:  One good man versus a 'bad law'

Oscar Lacombe, honorary sergeant-at-arms, politely refuses to register his 
rifle 

by Kevin Steel 

On the first day of the year, Oscar John Lacombe, 74, strode onto the 
Alberta Legislature grounds carrying a rifle. Wrapped in plastic, with the 
bolt removed, was his old Mark VII, manufactured in Canada, by H. W. Cooey 
Company (later Winchester Canada) out of Coburg, Ont. A standard issue to 
Cadet Services, he used this gun while a member of the Armed Forces in 
competition shooting against other army units, the RCMP and city police. A 
small crowd of reporters and media awaited him. They, like the police, had 
been notified he would be there. He placed the gun on the ground and asked 
two fellow soldiers, members of the Aboriginal Veterans Society, to join 
him. Herbert Bell, 70, a Korean War veteran, and Victor Letendre, 77, 
president of the society, a Second World War veteran, stepped forward and 
stood behind Mr. Lacombe, brothers in arms. 

With war medals glistening on chests in the low afternoon sun, Oscar Lacombe 
began to speak. He was there protesting the federal gun registry, he 
explained. As of January 1, 2003, all guns in Canada must be registered. 
Those that do not register them can face six months in jail or a fine of 
$2,000. This rifle on the ground, his rifle, was not registered. He had no 
intention of doing so. Therefore, he was now a criminal. "I'm the guy the 
government spent a billion dollars trying to catch," he said. "If the 
government believes in its law, then they better come and arrest me! And if 
they don't, then repeal the law!" 

Carrying his rifle, he defiantly walked to his truck, a brand new Dodge Club 
Cab driven by his son Brian, and drove away. 

The police followed. About 16 kilometres away, in north Edmonton, they were 
pulled over. The police were taking the gun. Mr. Lacombe has nothing but 
praise for the Edmonton Police tactical squad constables, who he says acted 
in a courteous and professional manner. The scene, however, was not without 
humour. One of the policemen made a slip of the tongue, saying, "I'm sorry, 
Mr. Lacombe, but we're going to have to confiscate your truck." "My truck!" 
Mr. Lacombe replied. "However am I going to get to church?" "The rifle," 
said the constable, correcting himself. "I mean, we have to confiscate the 
rifle." "Am I under arrest?" Mr. Lacombe asked. No, they said. He was free 
to go. 

In other parts of Canada things did not go as smoothly. On Parliament Hill, 
a rather rowdy group of 150 registry protestors gathered. Some burned their 
licences, others vowed - through megaphones - never to register any of their 
weapons. The police moved in when they began handing around a part of gun. 
John Turnbull, of Jarvie, Alta., and Ed Hudson from Saskatoon were charged 
with brandishing part of a firearm. 
Oscar Lacombe had just proved that he can openly, respectfully, defy the 
law, but the police will not openly arrest him. He also seemed to be 
proving, in relation to the gun registry, St. Augustine's observation that 
"A law that is not just, seems to be no law at all." 

So who is Oscar Lacombe, and why is he willing to stand up now, protesting 
the law of the land, risking jail? His main reason for this public civil 
disobedience is, in his words, "It's a bad law that directly affects me." He 
sees it as a costly adventure by a government pandering for urban votes but 
a law that will do little or nothing to enhance public safety. He does not 
believe that public support for the registry is as high as the media 
reports. Finally, and simply, he no longer trusts the government. 

He points to the auditor general's report released at the beginning of 
December. This estimated the cost of the registry would balloon to $1 
billion by 2005, this after they promised it would only cost $2 million to 
implement. "Now the same people who predicted it would cost a billion are 
saying it’ll cost $2 billion. And for what?" Mr. Lacombe asks rhetorically. 
"To make otherwise law-abiding people like me into criminals." 

As for his personal involvement, in the days leading up to the protest he 
would simply say, "I figured I'm the guy to do it." But even as he said 
this, there was a look of unease about him. This is not a man who takes to 
lawbreaking lightly. As he sat in the living room of his small bungalow in 
the town of Mundare, 77 kilometres east of Edmonton, where he moved this 
last September, his eyes roved the walls that are covered in pictures and 
framed letters that testify to a lifetime devoted to service and upholding 
the law. 

Proudly displayed in his front room are his Certificates of Service. For 
almost half of his adult life, Mr. Lacombe was a soldier. He joined the 
Armed Forces in 1949. Promoted to warrant officer, he served in Korea in 
1951, hauling ammunition and later with the military police. He went on to 
Japan, then to Europe for five years under the auspices of NATO. He did 
tours of Egypt, Cyprus and the Middle East as a peacekeeper for the UN. In 
all, he spent 27 years with the military, including his militia time. 

After leaving the army at the end of 1973, he became a bodyguard for the 
newly elected premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, a job he held for 12 
years. From there he went on to become the sergeant-at-arms in the Alberta 
Legislature, a post he held from 1980 to 1993, for a time pulling double 
duty as the premier's bodyguard when the Legislature was not sitting. He was 
the first Metis appointed to that position in Canada. Mr. Lacombe was so 
highly regarded as a sergeant-at-arms by the politicians and bureaucrats he 
worked with that, just after his retirement, on January 26, 1993, the 
Alberta Assembly passed the following motion: "Be it resolved that, the 
Legislative Assembly of Alberta confers upon Oscar J. Lacombe for his 
lifetime the title of Honorary Sergeant-at-Arms." This was the first time 
this honour had been so conferred in any of the Commonwealth countries. Even 
now, in his retirement, he continues to serve as a member of the Driver 
Control Board, monitoring licence suspensions. 

Elaborating on the fact that he is the "guy to do it," Mr. Lacombe says, 
"I've served my country well. I've got no criminal record. I've nothing but 
good things said about me, from lieutenant governors on down. I've even got 
a letter from a Governor General, and from ambassadors, so I think I've 
earned the right to criticize my government." And again he refers to the 
pictures on the walls, the memorabilia of a lifetime that testifies to his 
assertions. Alongside the framed letters he has portraits of the three 
premiers he worked under; Peter Lougheed, Don Getty and Ralph Klein, each 
personally signed, addressing him with notes of thanks. He has pictures of 
himself with former lieutenant governors Ralph Steinhauer, Grant MacEwan and 
a host of other dignitaries, both domestic and foreign. In his living room, 
he has a plaque from Pope John Paul II thanking him for his service as part 
of the Holy Father's bodyguard on his visit to Alberta in 1984. He considers 
this pontifical plaque "a great honour," though he does not consider himself 
particularly religious. (He does not use his second middle name, Joseph, 
because John Joseph sounds, as he says, "too Catholic.") 

He was, however, raised a Catholic. He was born in St. Paul, Alta., in 1929, 
on the eve of the Great Depression. On his father's side, he is a 
great-great grandnephew of the famous missionary Albert Lacombe; on his 
mother's, he is a great-grandson of Lawrence Garneau, one of the pioneers of 
Edmonton who homesteaded the land where the University of Alberta now 
stands. In all, Mr. Lacombe has three Native bloods coursing through him: 
Ojibwa, Sioux and Cree. Though he is proud of his heritage and background, 
he remembers a hard life growing up in a Metis family of 14, a life where 
the family just barely got by. They hunted so that they could put meat on 
the table. "If it wasn't for a .22 and a shotgun, I would have starved when 
I was a kid," Mr. Lacombe says. "You shot your food and you ate bannock in 
the wintertime to survive." 

He keenly recalls the first deer he shot, when he was just nine years old. 
"I had a little rabbit gun. It was September. I was down in an old slough 
that had dried up, where we cut hay. There were a couple of rabbits that 
were hanging off my belt, and one partridge, I believe. And I had shorts 
[bullets] because they were very cheap, and they were good enough for a 
rabbit or a partridge or a squirrel. And all of a sudden, I was sort of 
downwind, this deer stood up and just looked at me. And I looked at the 
deer. I carried five extra longs, mushroom bullets, it has a hole in the 
thing. My father had showed me how to unload and reload a gun by pulling the 
trigger so it does not click. I gave a short whistle; it turned like this 
[he turns his head to the side] and...[he points to a spot just below his 
ear and snaps his fingers] I had only a small pocket knife and could only 
cut one side of the throat, so I ran like hell to get my father." Only at 
the end of this story does one realize the nine-year-old hunter was alone, a 
fact that might horrify urbanites of today. But to Mr. Lacombe, it is a 
minor detail. Father and son brought the prize back home in a stone boat, a 
proud moment for a young provider. 

It is memories like these that best reflect his attitude towards firearms. 
Yes, he says, they can be dangerous. In fact, one of his concerns leading up 
to the protest was that someone with less experience than he might attempt 
to imitate him by carrying a loaded weapon to a protest and causing an 
accident. 

But with the proper safety training and the right attitude, firearms are not 
nearly as dangerous as he believes the media has made them out to be. "We 
were 12 kids in the house with a dozen or so guns around. On top of that, we 
had lots of cousins coming over all the time and visitors coming up from 
Saddle Lake to shoot black duck." He shakes his head. "There were no 
accidents." 

Mr. Lacombe makes this point because the basic argument advocates for gun 
control have used time and again is that more guns equal more death and 
injury. Gary Mauser, a professor in the faculty of business administration 
at Simon Fraser University who has written extensively on the gun-control 
issue, says this argument is simply stating the obvious. "It is a pretty 
solid fact that if you had no guns, you wouldn't have any gun accidents," he 
says. "In the same way, in a small town with no skyscrapers you have few 
people committing suicide by jumping off of skyscrapers." 

But this does not necessarily translate into a lower overall rate of death 
and injury. Often cited by gun-control advocates are firearm suicide rates. 
But they do not mention the fact that Canada, with a smaller percentage of 
gun ownership than the U.S., has a higher suicide rate overall than its 
neighbour to the south, according to World Health Organization statistics. 
This suggests that removing a means, like guns, does not, in the larger 
sense, necessarily affect the ends. 

But it is not only in suicide that the presumption that fewer guns equals 
less violence breaks down. In his 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime, author 
John Lott Jr. demonstrated that jurisdictions in the U.S. with high gun 
ownership had lower crime rates than those where guns were tightly 
restricted. And in areas that passed laws allowing citizens to carry 
concealed weapons, the crime rate actually went down. 
Conversely, a new book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, shows how 
the crime rate, particularly the rate of crimes involving handguns, can 
increase even as stricter gun-control measures are put in place. Though 
Britain already had strict gun control, in 1997 it banned all handguns in 
response to a 1996 massacre in a grade school gymnasium in Dunblane, 
Scotland, where Thomas Hamilton, using registered weapons, shot and killed 
16 young children and a teacher before turning the gun on himself. Following 
the ban, however, gun crime in Britain went up 40%; all violent crime 
doubled between 1997 and 2001. 

Joyce Malcolm, professor of history at Bentley College in Waltham, 
Massachusetts, and senior adviser in the MIT Security Studies Program, and 
the author of Guns and Violence, says that even as evidence mounts that the 
gun ban in Britain is having the effect opposite to that which it was 
intended, the pro-gun control forces are showing no sign of retreat. "I 
think they are so committed to the programs and have spent such an enormous 
amount of money on them, they simply cannot back down." 

She notes that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has just committed to 
allowing double jeopardy in order to reduce the number of jury trials 
because of the cost the rising crime rate is imposing on society. "So they 
are even willing to sacrifice ancient rights to solve a problem, rather than 
allow the public to rearm them-selves and re-introduce the right to 
self-protection." And she notes that Britain now has the most public 
surveillance of any country in the world, all to very little effect. 

She believes gun-control measures are an easy way for governments to appear 
to be doing something. "The goal should be public safety, and that goal is 
not being achieved by their gun-control measures. So they ought to look at 
other methods. People's lives are at stake." 

In Canada, the Centre for Firearms Control is going to great lengths to 
justify its existence, even as costs continue to skyrocket. On December 27, 
the government announced that all that was needed to meet the January 1 
deadline was a letter of intent, submitted through the mail, by fax or the 
Internet. Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz called this "covering their own 
butts" and saw it as a sign of desperation from a bureaucracy that had 
failed. 
As further evidence of this desperation, Mr. Breitkreuz points to a poll 
commissioned by the Firearms Centre but never released. Conducted by 
Government Policy Consultants Research at a cost of $3,800, the poll 
consisted of three statements and asked respondents if they agreed or 
disagreed. The statements were, in this order: 1) Generally speaking, 
Canadians would be better off if our firearms laws were more like the 
Americans. 2) Requiring Canadian drivers to be licensed and their cars to be 
registered helps to ensure that public safety is protected. 3) Requiring 
Canadian firearms owners to be licensed and their firearms to be registered 
helps to ensure that public safety is protected. 

In the trade, this is known as a push poll, in which questions are designed 
to produce a certain result, in this case, to show a high level of support 
for the gun registry by, first, playing on Canadians' perception of the U.S. 
as a violent society, and, second, by equating the registration of guns with 
the registration of vehicles, a specious analogy, given that a vehicle is 
more highly visible than a gun, and that in English common law there is no 
special right to drive as there is the right to bear arms. (For the record, 
of the 1,620 people surveyed, 61% disagreed with the first statement, 91% 
agreed with the second and 73% agreed with the third.) 

Despite the present desperation of the Liberal government on this issue, 
this does not change the fact that previous polls have consistently shown a 
high level of support for gun control in Canada. Gallup surveys since 1995 
show each year that support runs around 70%. But how will this support 
translate into practice, now that the registry is in effect? Will people 
start phoning the police and turning in their neighbours for possessing 
unregistered weapons? 

Given that the police are not charging people like Oscar Lacombe, who openly 
defied the registry, that hardly seems likely. Additionally, the level of 
non-compliance with this law, according to Ted Morton, professor of 
political science at the University of Calgary, is "staggering." He says 
there is a high level of non- compliance right across the socio- 
economic spectrum, from the wealthiest, most prominent, people in the 
community down to people working for $10 an hour. Unofficial estimates put 
the number of unregistered gun owners (now, on paper, as criminals) at 
between 200,000 and a million. "It'll be like prohibition in the U.S. 
Because the law will not be enforced, either by neighbours or by police, it 
will bring respect for the law down in general." 

Though the public will certainly demand the police try their utmost to keep 
firearms out of the hands of criminals, just owning a gun, registered or 
unregistered, may not be as scandalous or as odious as the federal 
government wants it to be. 

So Oscar Lacombe remains a free man. The federal government appears to have 
passed a law so bad that it is unwilling to enforce it. Mr. Lacombe is proud 
of the part he played in bringing that to light, though he admits, "Civil 
disobedience is really not my forte."