Big Brother hiding in the oun cabinet THE PROPOSED gun control regulations have arrived from Ottawa, printed on 100% post-consumabie (as distinct from pre-consumable) recycled paper. The paper is non-deinked, it is free of all chlorine-based bleach, and the inks used to print the regulations are vegetable-based. Is everybody back there totally mad? Mad or sane, it doesn’t matter, they run the country in the style they choose, and you and I op- pose them at our peril. The Gun Control! Act which passed the House and Senate in. December 1991, as Bill C-17, was the sort of cosmetic legislation to which we have become accustom- It invited the votes of all the MPs and general citizens who prefer safety to danger, peace to war and love to hatred. Everybody votes yes. What else? The regulations that would carry the nation onward and up- ward to a finer, a purer state of being, were not there when Parliament passed the bill. We were told they would be along later. Well, here they are. Thus there are pages of reguls- tions dealing with the safe storage of machine guns, Tommy guns Paul St. Pierre PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES a non-restricted firearm only where the non-restricted firearm is non-deinked and free of chlo- rine-based bleaches”’ ... no, sorry, that's a mistake, it reads ‘‘only where the non-restricted firearm (a) is unloaded and (b) is rendered inoperable by a secure locking &@ There are times in the life of any government when cosmetic laws seem better than the real kind.99 and various other forms of fully automatic guns which most of us thought had been deep-sixed in the oceans years ago. It becomes more jnteresting when the sizes of magazines on the more conventional semi- automatic rifles is the subject. There is to be an upper timit in size. Five shells is to be the max- imum. This means that a mass killer, loose in a crowd, will have ta take time to reload after each five people he kills. Either that or switch to a lever action or pump action gun which can have a magazine with 10 shells and which are just about as fast to reload and fire as are the semi-automatics. There is nothing wrong with limiting magazine sizes in high- powered rifles. Who wants to pack 15 or 26 extra cartridges on his deer gun? But there is nothing particularly right about it either, since the ad- ditional safety provided the gen- eral public is almost undetectable. Of course, mad-dog killers aren’t going to be controlled by any set of regulations, even those printed with carrot juice on post-consumer paper. However, it’s pointless to raise that question. There are times in the life of any government when cosmetic laws seem better than the real kind. They allay the fears of the witless and ignorant and usually do not irritate the knowledgeable. But this cosmetic legislatiou packs enough paint, powder and eye shadow that it may be that bad. Dealing with non-restricted weapons, the kind most Canadian families have had in the nome for the past few hundred years, we find Section 4 of 92-193-01 SOR/DORS: “