"Opinionatedly Yours"
#16: October 23, 1998
Children and Guns in the Bush
By Barry Kent MacKay

We call it "the bush." The term is not sharply defined. It refers to any natural, off-the-track, wooded area. In Ontario, where I live, it usually refers to the woodlands of the north -- more correctly called "taiga" or "boreal forest." This is land dominated by rocky outcroppings -- among the oldest known rocks that constitute the "Precambrian Shield" -- black spruce, sphagnum bogs, tamarack, slender white birch trees, and endless networks of cold, clear lakes and rivers of central and northern Ontario.

South of the Precambrian Shield, where most of the human citizens of the province live, the land is largely cultivated in checkerboard patterns of wide fields and remnant wood lots. This quilt-patterned landscape continues on the other side of the Great Lakes, into upper New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and on out into the great plains of the Midwest. Here, where the forest has been mostly cleared, we tend to talk of the "woods" or "marsh" or "fields" when we talk of those areas where men and boys (and a few women and girls) go to hunt.

I grew up spending as much time as I could in the bush, to the north, or, far more often, in the woods, fields, marshes, hedgerows, abandoned farms and orchards, pine plantations, quarries, beaches, mudflats, maple woodlots, old cemeteries, city ravines, or anywhere else there might be birds and wildlife nearer to home. There was never a time when I discovered the joys of birdwatching or nature study; I've done it from as early as I can remember.

They call it "birding" now, more than birdwatching. However, neither name describes this activity -- not as I do it; its purpose is not only birds I "watch" or look for, it is the environment I experience and the things I learn that constitute the basis for the pleasure I derive from the endeavor. It is the individual animals and plants that provide the vibrant, living foci within the landscape. The term "nature study" comes far closer to describing the way I go birding. However, the term has a fussy quaintness to it, evoking images of elderly eccentrics with butterfly nets scampering through hedgerows and parklands, lost in appreciation of trivial minutiae while oblivious to social norms.

As a child I had a simplistic concept of "wilderness" as an ideal state of being that was diminished in inverse ratio to the amount of human intrusion that had occurred. And since I was all too seldom in the absence of at least some reminder of human endeavor, it was the products or "components" of that ideal -- wilderness -- that I cherished as they occurred where I could see them. What magic in the sight of a nest full of baby spotted sandpipers, in the eye of a leopard frog or in the delicate bloom of bloodroot or the whistle of a chipmunk. No matter that I might be seeing such things at the edge of an old cemetery, deserted dump or abandoned farm.

In mid-September 1998, the Ontario provincial government decided to lower the age at which a person can hunt animals with a gun. Up until then a kid as young as 15 could be licensed to shoot animals, but the government decided to lower the age to 12. The decision was made without public consultation. The child, in order to obtain a permit, must complete a safety course. The child cannot use the permit unless under the supervision of a licensed hunter over the age of 18, and parents or guardians must provide written permission for the child to acquire the hunting permit.

Canadian Pride

Canada, for all that it contains huge wilderness areas where a gun may be all that prevents starvation, is far less of a "gun culture" than the United States. While the Ontario government was making its regulatory changes to the law in secret, quite publicly the federal government was bringing in new legislation that will require all rifles and shotguns to be registered and outlaw assault weapons. Handguns must already be registered. That federal program would be in place by now except that Ontario is not ready to administer the law, and is petulantly claiming it will not do so. Latest word is that the law will be in force on January 1, 1999. There has been some organized opposition, but the federal Minister is firm as she has an overwhelming mandate, with something in excess of 80% of Canadians backing the legislation.

As guns were in the news and a demonstration was held in Ottawa to protest the new law, there was an American brought north to tell Canadians that they'd all be a lot safer if they all were allowed to carry concealed weapons. He received short shrift. We Canadians have been raised on harrowing stories of the huge differences in gun deaths between areas of similar population sizes in the two countries. We need only compare the rates of death by gun in cities of similar population sizes in the two countries to conclude that our way is better. Our smugness is not all that justified, to be sure, but in general we feel, rightly or wrongly, more secure in the cities north of the international border.

Case in Point

Flash forward a month, from when 12-year-olds could be armed, to October 6, 1998. It was the last evening of an intense visit to Ottawa, to hold a media conference and to lobby on the issue of a proposed massive slaughter of 1.5 million lesser snow geese. (That's a separate issue I've talked about before, in this space, and I will do so again.) My friend, Susan, who works in Washington DC, wanted to pick up some peanuts for a rather ragged, late-brooded and therefore quite small black squirrel who was hanging around the hotel garden. She was to fly home the next day and wanted to give the "little guy" a bit of extra food to help him build up that all important fat reserve with which to face the oncoming winter.

I drove down into a residential area, just east of the Rideau Canal, where I found a convenience store still open. It was about ten o'clock at night. I pulled over to the curb. "You can get the peanuts there," I said.

"Is it safe?" asked Susan.

There were two other Canadians in the car with me and all three of us chimed in that of course it was! Why on earth wouldn't it be?

But of course after we spoke out we all knew what was behind Susan's matter-of-fact question. One of my friends went with Susan to get the peanuts. Violence can strike anywhere at any time. The probability of encountering it on a dark street in an American city seems so much greater than in a Canadian city, or cities in many other countries, as well, where there is no assumed "right" to bear arms and no gun culture of the magnitude to be found in the U.S. That includes countries with high rates of gun ownership, such as Switzerland.

How well I recall my own shock, many years ago, when I arrived in Denver for the first time in my adult life and asked the clerk at the downtown hotel I was staying in if there was a nearby park I could visit the next morning. I explained I was a birder and I thought if there was a park nearby I'd go there to enjoy what urban wildlife I might encounter at sunup, prior to breakfast, and the beginning of the dayful of meetings I was to attend. It was autumn and I wanted to get up early enough to meet the dawn in a park. "There is a park," I was told, "but you can't go there." When I asked why not, I was told that if I tried, I'd be picked up by the police, for my own protection! Did he really mean the police would not allow a pedestrian to walk along the sidewalk or visit a park before daybreak? I was told it simply would not be allowed. "Believe me, sir. It's for your own good!"

Amazing.

And I recall the utter horror of American friends in Washington DC when I described the night of my first visit to that fabled city. Unable to sleep I left the hotel around ten P.M. and explored, on foot, until after two in the morning. When I described my nocturnal wanderings I was told how lucky I had been not to have been robbed, beaten, or shot, or at least arrested, and that I must never do such a foolish thing again.

Since then I've encountered many other such situations -- we Canadians do that and then talk about it among ourselves, with self-righteous smugness, I'm afraid, pleased to have some level of superiority over our huge and wealthy neighbors to the south. Here, in Canadian cities, we have an improved chance of not being shot due to a superior control of guns, or at least that is how we like to think. In fact, among the industrialized nations, Canada ranks fifth in the rate of children under 14 who are killed by guns. The U.S. is, of course, in the lead, with a constitutional right to bear arms seen as superseding a right to grow up. It is followed by Finland, Northern Ireland, and Israel.

Although Harris called his campaign platform "the common sense revolution," common sense might dictate that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Among provinces Ontario has the lowest rate of children killed with guns (0.2 per 100,000). Provinces with higher gun ownership and with hunter training programs for children have high rates (1.0 per 100,00 for Saskatchewan, for example). Alberta, also with an extreme rightwing government, already licenses underage children to hunt, and has a death rate of children killed by guns that is nearly five times greater than Ontario's (0.2 per 100,000 per year).

In the U.S., as we saw in the states of Oregon, Kentucky, and Arkansas last year, the fact that a child is a graduate of a gun safety training course does not provide the degree of maturity or responsibility that should be requisites to gun ownership. In the states the National Rifle Association, who sees locked trigger guards as a bad thing (!), has its "Eddie Eagle" program to promote children's interest in guns. Children involved in the recent shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas were graduates of the Eddie Eagle Program.

Not That It Matters, But ...

And so the response to the Ontario government's plan to lower the age limit at which children could be in public areas while armed with a gun was predictable. Most folks opposed it. But of course that didn't matter. The so-called Progressive Conservative (PC) party (the "Tories") is generally rightwing, it's true, but this particular provincial Tory party, under the leadership of former golf-pro, Mike Harris, is notoriously so. There was widespread speculation that the move had been made to bolster the chances of a Tory being elected in the Nickel Belt riding, in northern Ontario, where hunting is relatively popular. In any event the Tory lost to the National Democratic Party -- the NDP -- the socialist party who had formed the previous provincial government, but had been soundly defeated by Mike Harris and his bunch.

The simple solutions that the extremes of the right or the left provide as cure-alls to complex questions are attractive to voters. No doubt the provincial Tories would prefer to have more people agree that 12-year-olds should be allowed to hunt, but assume that the move will garner the rural support that they see as their stronghold. Ontario is a huge place and by winning the rural vote a party can win the election overall even though the majority of Ontario citizens are urbanites and suburbanites.

Contrary to Canadian myth, a rural resident has a statistically greater chance of being shot than does an urbanite. But that does not stop the gun-lovers from seeing misuse of firearms as an urban affair. To be sure, not all hunters agreed that 12-year-olds should be allowed to hunt. Perhaps some non-hunters agreed that they should. In balance, however, it didn't matter what anyone thought, and the tremendously influential Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters certainly supported the legislative change.

Proponents made the charge that federal legislation actually allowed children of 12 or older to "possess and discharge" a firearm. The new legislation filled a "void" by allowing the children to hunt, while doing so, and mandating training and supervision. I'm not sure why the fact that a kid can hold or shoot a gun should mean he or she should be allowed to kill animals in a public area, but then I'm not a Tory nor a supporter of Mike Harris.

Official Training

While I cannot say I was surprised by any of the reaction, there were some things said in defense of the change that left me very sad.

First, the argument was made that all the law did was to legalize and provide structure for what was already taking place. Parents were already taking kids out to shoot animals, so now it would be regulated, with need for a hunter's course that takes about 16 hours and teaches how to safely handle firearms, recognize "game," and how to handle guns safely when doing such things as climbing fences or clambering into boats. One safety instructor said the official course would replace parents' training. "Whereas before they were only as safe as their parents' instructions, now they'll officially get the safety course."

Have we learned nothing? Were the youngsters involved in three separate shooting incidents in the U.S. not graduates of similar training programs?

There was irony, too, in the fact that the information about the provincial Tories secret plan, which came from a memo leaked to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, surfaced just as the city of Montreal, Quebec, announced funding for a long overdue monument to honor those slain in Canada's most infamous multiple-homicide. It was in 1990 that an ex-soldier, no doubt very well trained in fire-arm safety, but dropped from the military for his anti-social attitudes, killed 14 women at an engineering school in that city, before killing himself. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Moncton, and Ottawa already have erected such monuments to the women, mostly students, who were lost in that horrific bloodbath. Canadian cities may be safer on average than their U.S. counterparts, but sadly, there is no room for the smug complacency we Canadians too often display.

It is not training that is the problem so much as the proliferation of guns, and the younger the person is who is inculcated into the gun culture, the greater that proliferation is about to be. Ask any classroom of teens how many hunt, or want to and watch what happens; most of the hands that go up -- often all of them -- are boys. Then ask how many of them have fathers or uncles who hunt, and it's the same group. We "condition" our children toward our values, and while they may rebel against those that are most superficial (thus conforming to their own sets of values) such as clothing and appearance (indeed, especially clothing and appearance) there are core values that are assumed as "givens" and not questioned.

Law and Order

It seems to be that the very fathers who welcomed the legislative change because it legalized what was already happening were, themselves, guilty of law-breaking. That's probably a moot point. Most of us, myself included, who have shot guns or who own guns, probably fired our first shot by age of 12, and probably without much thought to the legality of it all. Many of us sipped a bit of booze, smoked a cigarette, or did a spot of driving before we were at an age or in possession of a proper permit to do so. Last week I met with a Grand Chief of a native community in northern Ontario who said that by age 6 most kids had received gun training and begun hunting.

But I have to agree with another politician, Sandra Pupatello, the children's policy critic for the PC's traditional rivals, the Liberals, who said, "Just because people are doing 130 on the highway doesn't mean we should increase the speed limit."

To those people who would arm children, arguments about either the law or the logic of doing so are probably not worth waging. Such folks won't share my own concern about the risks inherent to firearm proliferation. They are interested in being allowed to do what they want to do, not in extrapolations from statistical analysis of social trends. They certainly don't have a compassion for animals that would preclude their wanting to kill them. The Provincial Tory government has given them what they want.

Saddest of All

On September 17, The Toronto Star published a most extraordinary story, written by Kerry Gillepsie and Daniel Girard. "Thanks to a new provincial regulation," it says, "13-year-old Travis will be able to go hunting with his dad, Wayne. For father and son it's pure 'quality time' together, doing the sport they love."

The article is accompanied by a picture of fresh-faced young Travis, age 13, kneeling with one arm around his dog, Maggie, and the other cradling his pump-action shotgun.

"He just doesn't take the gun and shoot holes in everything, running wild through the bush," Travis's father, Wayne, is quoted as saying. "He's as safe with a gun as I am."

Howard Hampton, the leader of the provincial NDP, a product of the north, is also a hunter, yes, but he's an opposing politician. So, not surprisingly, he is quoted as saying, "The vast majority of people across Ontario believe that kids who are 12 and 13 years old are frankly too young to be handling firearms." Hampton claimed he went hunting with his own dad at a similarly tender age, but was not allowed to shoot. That, at least, would have been legal.

But let's get back to young Travis. He's already learned the hunters' tiresome rhetoric. "You find out new things about the bush," he's quoted as saying, in reference to plants and animals, and besides that, it's fun, "... a time to get away from everything else."

And Travis is not alone in his opinion. Matthew, age 13, of Peterborough, Ontario, is also enthused. His father, Eric, says, "All we're doing is legitimizing something that has been happening anyway." Having admitted to his contempt for the game laws of the province when they don't suit him, the father goes on to say, "You want your fellows to learn properly. Contrary to popular opinion, it's really not a bad thing. It's about the only excuse you have to spend two or three hours in the bush."

His son added: "Going out with my dad, for one it's a good time for quality time."

Oh how sad. How very, very sad, and very, very wrong.

Of course each of us sees things differently, but how impoverished must be an imagination of a father who can think of no other way of enjoying "quality time" with his child but by going into the bush with a gun.

Yes, yes, I understand that it is so often argued that killing is not the main purpose of hunting. One goes to the bush for the experience of the out-of-doors; the killing is incidental; a good time can be had without it. That's the argument, more or less, so often heard.

But then why not do it, as I always have somehow been able to, at any time of year, without killing something or even trying to kill something? The healthful pleasures one can enjoy in the company of children -- pleasures that involve no killing and no risk to other people also trying to enjoy the out-of-doors -- are many, and include skiing, tobogganing, skating, hiking, riding, photography, canoeing, camping, picnicking, and -- dare I say it -- nature study.

The latter involves not just those animals designated as "game" but all animals and plants, and not just during the hunting season, but at all times of year, and not just in the bush, but anywhere wildlife may occur, from one's local park or the backyard to the depths of a wilderness area.

Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no other aspect of hunting that requires guns and all other aspects of hunting, including the bonding that comes from close contact and focused effort, can be done in the absence of guns.

My hope is that there will be no tragedy. I know many 12-year-olds would argue as I would have done at that age, that they have the maturity and the good sense to accept the responsibility that goes with using lethal weaponry in public areas. But they don't. It's not their fault, and the degree of responsibility that children do possess is highly variable. Not old enough to vote, or to legally consent to sex, or to drive a car, or to join the military, neither are these children old enough to be safe with guns in the bush. It's a bad move.

But apart from all that, I feel sorry knowing that there are children out there whose parents are so bereft of imagination that they can think of no better way than enjoying "quality time" with their offspring.

As for me -- as it now is I don't enter the bush, not the forested areas, during the deer-hunting season. I'm not afraid of guns but I am very afraid of hunters, adult hunters, who may have lapses in judgment. I am in the bush at all other seasons. I am willing to risk shotguns in the fall marshes, and I'm willing to risk rifles in the spring bear-hunting season, but not the rifles and crossbows and long bows of the fall deer hunters when the vegetation obscures lines of fire and a single bad decision can end in tragedy.

The bush has now become a whole lot more dangerous. You'll not find me there.

Nor will you find a certain 17-year-old former student of Lake Sharbot High School in the bush, ever again. Just before the middle of October, in the height of the hunting season, when the skies were blue and the air clear and the trees mantled in glorious shades of gold, he was shot, dead, by his 13-year-old cousin as the boys enjoyed a hunting trip in eastern Ontario, in the bush.

All accounts are that the 13-year-old had not taken the hunter safety course. I guess he was too anxious to get out and enjoy the bush.