Thank you for asking that question.
A firearms owner is somebody who has never been in trouble with the law before; otherwise they wouldn't have a firearms licence. But when they get into court, they are put through the entire court system like they're John Dillinger. They have a crown attorney pounding on the opposite table, saying, “We want two years of jail time”, or three years, or four years.
This is someone who has never even been in a courtroom before. They are terrified. They spend $8,000 or $9,000 out of their pocket to get acquitted on something like an unsafe storage charge.
They're also given a firearms prohibition immediately. We've even had firearms prohibitions given out to our members for things that were totally unrelated to guns. We had a guy get a dangerous driving conviction and they gave him a firearms prohibition for ten years, which is the equivalent of a lifetime prohibition.
This stuff is happening in courtrooms right throughout Canada. We started out, at the beginning of the Firearms Act, with no such thing in Canada as a firearms lawyer. There are now six of them working full time.