Category Archives: Security

When Safety Forgot about Scammers

Down the rabbit hole of Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada

I’ve been meaning to write something about Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada for about 2 years now, mostly as a follow-up to my 2013 post about the British bans. I kept putting it off. Partly because the subject is annoying, and partly because I knew I’d end up rewriting it a hundred times anyway.

I decided to get GPT to fact-check some things for me, and since it’s getting pretty good at putting things together in my style now, I got it to write me an outline for this based on my notes and questions, which I then butchered. My GPT instance named itself Arlo – So thanks, Arlo. My first GPT-sorted weblog post, which now I don’t have to write a separate post about!

As an aside, I think I once promised to write something at least once a decade in this weblog. I failed, sorry.

A small note, the same as in the 2013 post – I am probably going to refer to guns, I know that guns are usually artillery, but I am using the general term to cover long guns and handguns. See that post for the distinctions, I just don’t want to complicate things.

Back in 2020, Trudeau suddenly banned over 1,500 models of what the anti-gun folks like to call “assault-style” firearms. No parliamentary debate, no vote, just an executive action that came out of nowhere. They called it a public safety measure, but it has always felt more like a PR move, something to make headlines and gain some short-term victory with people who don’t know the first thing about guns.

The ban was full of contradictions. It targeted rifles that looked scary but were, functionally, no different from many hunting rifles. Meanwhile, it left out the SKS, a semi-automatic battlefield rifle from the 1940s that still has its folding bayonet attached. Designed for the Red Army after WW2, the SKS was a short-lived predecessor to the much more famous AK-47. When the AK-47 proved more effective (as it still is today), millions of unused SKS rifles were packed into crates, coated in cosmoline (a brown waxy petroleum jelly), and stored away. Sixty years later, someone decided to start selling them in bulk to Canada, an ideal market being one of the only Western countries that still allowed firearms imports from Russia and China (unlike the USA).

The SKS fires cheap and readily available 7.62x39mm ammunition, and quickly became popular in Canada. Sellers could buy grease-filled wooden crates of them for a few hundred dollars, some of them brand new, some obviously used. Individual rifles went for as little as $80 if you were willing to clean off the gunk yourself or $30 or so extra for them to be shiny and clean. Prices have gone up considerably since then, with decent examples now selling for over $500. Any compensation for banning them would need to reflect that big increase in price since the 2020 ban.

A Russian SKS rifle, duplicated one on top of the other to show both sides. The stock is polished wood and there is a folded in metal bayonet on the dangerous end. The SKS is still excluded from Trudeau's gun ban in Canada.

From Wikipedia – A 1945 SKS rifle. Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada didn’t ban these as being ‘assault weapons’.

Somehow, the SKS, the military rifle of the Soviet Union after WW2, with its folding bayonet, is fine, and not an assault weapon. The official line was that the SKS is used by Indigenous hunters, so it was left alone out of respect for that. This sounds thoughtful, until you realise it’s also the rifle that would cost the most to buy back. Suddenly the official line sounds like a completely bollocks excuse. There are probably well over a million SKS rifles in the country, all of them unregistered. Nobody knows who has them or how many there are. If they’d banned the SKS, it would have caused an absolute logistical and financial nightmare, so they didn’t. This is where the logic of the whole ban starts to crumble. It stops being about consistent principles and becomes about politics, cost, and convenience. This was a key decision that exposed the contradictions at the heart of a mess that Canada is still reckoning with.

Trudeau’s gun ban didn’t just hit long guns, it blindsided handgun owners and collectors too. In 2022 a new action decreed that there would be no new handgun sales, no transfers, nothing. The regulation and rules for handguns have always been very strict in Canada so this was really targeting the most regulated, licenced, and well trained people. This ban really stung because a lot of us have spent years building legal collections. Mostly for the sport or for historical collecting – But also as what used to be a guaranteed investment. I have handguns I was planning to sell off as part of my retirement, but I can’t anymore. Now they just sit there, locked up and essentially worthless. The Liberal government talks about compensation but it’ll never reflect the actual value, especially for antiques and rarities. It’ll be a pretty paltry sum if anything ever comes of it at all.

There’s another issue with handguns that may well hit me and other people who bought some of their handguns as parts guns. These are handguns that were probably not originally functional anyway and have basically been gutted to repair another gun. Often there’s nothing left of the original. I think I have two that fit into this situation, so how am I going to give those back? I never expected them to ask me to account for them – But now it seems I may have to. Will a signed affidavit that there is nothing of the original gun left, or will I have to create something to give them?

The enforcement side of things is also going to be a farce. Most of the newly banned rifles were never registered, so no one knows who’s got what. They’re not going to be handed in, they’ll get stashed, stored, or buried until a Conservative government gets in and reverses the bans. Same with handguns, although these are registered so they’re at least on the books for now. Since the ban, people have died and suddenly those handguns have gone missing. Not many folks are ringing up the RCMP to hand them over, so they are slipping out into the grey market. I know of people who’ve had those quiet conversations: Grampy didn’t tell us what happened to them… The cops can’t arrest a corpse, can they?

The thing is that none of this is a surprise. When you treat people like criminals, they start behaving like criminals. Generally not out of malice, but out of a sense of self-preservation. We had a well-regulated system that most gun owners followed to the letter. We locked our cabinets, took our courses, filed our paperwork, and played by the rules. Now those rules are gone, and nobody trusts the system anymore. People do what they feel they have to, especially when a struggling government starts seizing their property on the back of a flimsy and inconsistent political excuse.

What’s worse is that it won’t even help. Most major gun crime in Canada doesn’t come from legal gun owners. The two notable exceptions are the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre and the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting, both involving legally owned firearms. But the shootings that triggered these bans were carried out almost entirely with illegal guns – smuggled or stolen. Instead of tackling the sources of those illegal firearms, Trudeau’s government went after the easy target with big PR value: licenced owners. The vast majority of licenced Canadian gun owners are incredibly law-abiding (if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have stuck to all the obscure rules for this long), and it’s much easier to demonise people than to address the real causes. The unlicenced ones are already criminals, so no new laws were needed there, just better enforcement of existing ones.

It was all just obvious desperation and security theatre. A Prime Minister with sinking poll numbers trying to score points with people who wouldn’t know a restricted PAL from a banana clip [That was a good one Arlo, I left that in!]. The result was that a few million Canadians were suddenly labelled as potential threats, just for owning the same thing they did the day before and leaving taxpayers, and whichever government comes next with a multi-billion dollar bill.

None of it makes sense if you assume the government were trying to improve safety. It only makes sense if you realise they were trying to win a news cycle. A month ago, I’d have said the Conservatives were a surefire bet to win, and this is a single-issue election topic for a lot of people as was seen in rural elections in 2024. Even if you’re not a gun owner, you ought to be pissed off about how this was pushed through by executive action, without any real reason, consistency, or evidence. Trump’s threatened war with Canada (trade and territorial) has changed the polls in the next election, and given Pee Pee’s love of Trump I’d hope these people would vote Liberal now. I don’t think many will – I’m not even sure I would, but thankfully I can’t vote anyway, so I don’t have to agonise about it.

If the Liberals lose because they pissed off 3 million gun owners for short-term propaganda gains, it’d serve them right.

Notes:

. Pee Pee is Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s Conservative leader. Endorsed by Trump and backed by American billionaires. May the gods save Canada if that whiney orange teat-sucker gets in.

. There’s an SKS unboxing video showing some of the cosmoline here on YouTube.

Everything is good in moderation; except moderation…

We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner…

3 Replies

In the last few months, I have read an awful lot of articles and watched far too many YouTube videos about gun ownership and the British gun ban. I didn’t set out to do this at all; it’s just that I sometimes read articles about guns and they link to other things – And somehow 2 or 3 links down they always seem to turn into a rabid political mess.

One of the things I notice is there appears to be an enormous chasm between the two sides. More often than not the two sides don’t even seem to be talking about the same things. There is no consistency of terms, no attempt to understand what each other is saying and the whole thing is so emotive that it is all essentially gibberish.

I was curious whether I could say anything new or present a middle-of-the-chasm view of all of this. I don’t have an agenda and I certainly don’t expect to change anybody on either side’s minds but I may be able to at least say something to the people who don’t have an opinion already. There is no conclusion to this, no tied up loose ends and no solutions. I have no political agenda and I am not a miracle worker. It also ended up too long – Sorry!

First off – I am a gun owner. I have a lot of guns of all shapes and sizes and I know some of the mentality of other gun owners. That being said, I am also a Brit and although I am an unusual one in that I grew up with guns and don’t find them particularly alien things; at the same time, I don’t have any of this North American mindset about them. I had air guns from a young age, I have shot various weird things over my youth and from university age onwards I shot handguns at a range and owned a number of legal compressed-air handguns that didn’t require a range. I am well trained in the use of handguns and passable with rifles and shotguns.

After the two big modern gun-bans in the UK following the Hungerford and Dunblaine massacres (1988 and 1997 respectively) there was a change in the law and then a huge police recall of guns that were now illegal to own. People who owned guns that had been banned were forced to take them to police stations and there were triumphant press photographs and videos of the guns being crushed or melted down by their thousands … And here we hit the first problem of understanding between gun and none gun people – Guns are expensive. I would estimate that the average price of my handguns is about $1,000 each and when you see a million guns being crushed, that means a billion dollars of people’s hard earned money has just been removed from them with no compensation or right to refuse. The vast majority of these people were completely law abiding people; members of clubs who shot at pieces of paper and whether you approve of the sport or not it’s hard to approve of the way this was handled – And this is obviously one thing that North American gun owners are scared of happening.

In January 2004 there was actually a third gun ban in the UK covering “Air guns chambered for self-contained gas cartridges” – This was the first time I had been directly hit by one of the laws. Since the 1988 and 1997 acts, European law had decreed that the UK government couldn’t actually take my guns off me and crush them because this was illegal – The government wasn’t going to buy them off me so they made a law that said I could licence them under a section-5 firearms certificate with the added restriction that I could not use the guns, sell the guns (not even to somebody else with a section 5 FAC), lend the guns, let anybody see the guns or in fact, do anything at all with them except keep them locked in a safe that had to be inspected every year or so by the police. I could simply keep them until the administrative hassle and cost of keeping them became so annoying that I simply sent them to be crushed. Because I am belligerent and we are talking a few thousand dollars worth of guns here, I kept them and eventually I just took them to another country where they are now perfectly legal.

I don’t know what the answer to this problem is – I don’t pretend to know but I do know there is a huge hypocrisy here and it is useful to paint gun owners as demons so that people won’t want to defend some pretty basic human rights that stops a government just stealing people’s formerly legal possessions. The hypocrisy comes in the fact that the UK is the sixth biggest arms exporter in the world – So logic could just say that maybe they should have sold the guns they confiscated and used the money to compensate people. It’s hard to defend crushing billions of dollars worth of guns by a government that makes a fortune selling the exact same items around the world. And this matter would be even more hypocritical in the USA.

So let’s travel across the Atlantic to the northernmost country of North America, Canada. Canadian gun laws are somewhat odd and have changed recently so I will summarise them. There are essentially three types of guns (we are just talking about guns you can carry here, I am ignoring canons, howitzers and the like until we start talking about the USA): Long-guns (rifles, shotguns etc), Restricted weapons (most modern general-purpose handguns) and Prohibited weapons which is everything else – Prohibited weapon licences generally exist just for people who owned these guns before the laws changed (Canada didn’t generally just crush things) but people are allowed to use them, sell them to other people with prohibited licences and sometimes even will them to direct descendants. A lot of these guns are war souvenirs and historical collectors’ weapons so it makes sense.

Until last year, all of these guns had to be registered but Harper’s Conservative government, realising there was a huge division between country people and city people in Canada, decided that abolishing the registry for long-guns was a big vote grabber and so they got rid of it. As I am writing this, Quebec just lost their final appeal to keep their data of long-gun ownership so as of now, all the former data has been destroyed. This does NOT affect registration and restrictions on other types of guns, just most hunting rifles and shotguns.

Now there really does seem to be quite a gap of understanding and experience between Canadians who live in cities and Canadians who live in the country about long-guns. I fall very much into the country camp myself I think – A long gun is about as much of a dangerous weapon as an axe or a chainsaw and they are just there as tools to be mostly ignored until they are useful. Country folks can’t see why you would want or need to register a shotgun any more than you’d need to register anything else. The most illegal thing they are likely to use it for is taking a pot-shot at the 4-wheeler drivers using their fields as race-tracks (which isn’t going to kill anyone). City folks only ever see guns on TV and the TV has a very odd relationship with reality at the best of times.

Handguns are a different matter. There is still a registry for handguns, you need paperwork whenever you transport one and you can only transport them very locked up, with ammo completely separate and you can only transport them on a direct route to and from the destination (which is nearly always either a government approved range, or a gun-shop). Nobody complains about this, there is no real history of a handgun being a tool in Canada and there seems to be no will or perceived need to use handguns for self-defence. The only people who have handguns other than the police are people who target shoot and those people have very little to do with the general population of long-gun owners really.

There is a problem that I come across sometimes, in that the Canadian laws make no sense at all on some issues. Legend tells than when they decided to classify some guns as Restricted and some guns as Prohibited, somebody from the government went through that year’s “Gun Digest” and picked out all the dangerous looking photos and prohibited them. The laws also haven’t kept in any way up to date to the point where you can look at two functionally identical guns by two different manufacturers and one will be a long gun, and one will be prohibited. My AR-15 in .22 is prohibited whereas identical ones in both .22 and .223 fall comfortably into the long-gun category. I have NO idea why and that can often be a problem. There is also a magazine capacity issue (the number of bullets a gun can hold) which often makes no logical sense at all either. Also any handgun shooter of any skill simply won’t understand magazine capacity laws in general at all anyway.

Again in Canada, gun ownership seems to have been politicised to the point where gun owners are now considered to be Conservatives and non gun owners generally Liberals. For what it’s worth, in North American terms I would probably be considered a Socialist/Communist so this doesn’t always work; and frankly it is painful to speak to a lot of people I meet in the gun community here. The problem is that the Conservatives are seen as the party who understand guns and the views of gun owners, and the Liberals are the people who want to take them off us. As a side note, I wonder why Canada doesn’t have a Socialist party and how a Liberal can be “middle of the road” if there is no party on the left, but that’s another topic altogether.

Speaking as a handgun shooter I find another thing rather odd – I have noticed that when I put up photos of myself using a bow and arrow, people tend to like it and ask actual questions; and yet if I put up a photograph of myself with a gun I get generally negative and pre-assumptive comments. I can’t find any actual figures to back this up but my educated-guess is that historically, handguns have killed very few people; bows and arrows have killed a lot more, swords, axes, stones, lumps of wood will have killed more again. Even looking at long guns, “assault rifles” and automatic weapons we are probably not adding huge numbers to the amounts killed – Artillery and bombs kill a hell of a lot more people in wars than guns.

And now let’s finally wander into the United States of America – A country in which I have never lived so I can only go on what I have seen. But I have seen a lot and heard a lot on both sides, so I am going to at least pretend I can attempt an overview. I can’t claim to be unbiased about the USA because there is a lot of stuff I don’t understand at all – But I will try to discuss some possible misunderstandings.

First off I am going to set some premises:

I am going to take the stance that the USA has a very odd gun culture which is driven by politics, fear, a complete unwillingness to compromise, history and probably most importantly, capitalism and advertising. It’s like the tobacco industry gone completely wild. Arms companies in the USA make a phenomenal amount of guns of all shapes and sizes and they sell them both abroad and domestically. It is a huge business.

Americans, unlike Canadians and Europeans have a culture of being able carry guns. I would conjecture that this is mostly due to over a century of gun-advertising as opposed to any actual need to do so but I may be straying from my neutrality by doing so.

The Second Amendment (which allows the general populace to bear arms and if necessary to form militias to overthrow a tyrannical government) is terribly written and hasn’t been changed for centuries; and this is in a country where some people would be more than happy to follow Leviticus to the letter if legislation didn’t stop them from doing so. Apparently laws that people like are set in stone, and laws that people don’t like are nonsense to be fought over tooth-and-claw. Of course, it is illegal to form militias to overthrow the government in the USA now and it is illegal for states to secede, but that doesn’t seem to stop people trying to uphold the first part as absolute gospel.

Human life seems (to us folks looking in) to be pretty cheap in the USA – The country as a whole seems somewhat obsessed with bombing foreigners into the dark-ages, States execute criminals that include kids and the mentally ill and people who own guns for self-defence seem to think that it is perfectly fine to kill somebody who is committing a crime. And boy, does Hollywood loves guns! On the flip side, the reasons given for invading counties like Iraq tend to include comments about protecting the freedoms not to be executed without trial and such; and I am all too aware of the obsession with labelling people as “illegals” to both dehumanise them and justify actions against them. The police carry (and often use) guns, Criminals carry and often use guns. It seems an odd mess over there and gun sales keep on going up. It could be suggested that all of this is in the interest of the companies that sell guns, and all of this is essentially advertising that is creating a self-feeding situation in which the only winners are the people who sell guns to the domestic market – Be they blue-chip gun companies, Mexican drug lords or street gangs.

And now for some balance – Even with all this said – A lot of people own guns because they want to own guns; not because they want to create a militia to round up all the Mexicans in their town and gun them down over open graves – In fact, I have never personally met an American who would want to do that (though sadly, I have read a lot of crap from ones who do).

Guns are fun – This seems to be something that the anti-gun lobby just can’t get into their brains. Guns ARE fun, they are beautiful pieces of engineering and to many, beautiful historic art – and they are wonderful to shoot. You point them at cans on a fence and there is a rush of satisfaction in blowing them up from a distance. I don’t care what images the anti-gun people will try and associate with this but when I am blowing up milk cartons of water with a .44 Magnum I am never thinking “Wow that could be a shoplifter’s head!” – I am just not and I very much doubt are most American gun owners. When you let off or watch a firework display and the carefully timed explosions create an explosive Son et lumière in the night sky are you thinking that you could be pointing these at a village in Afghanistan, or that the same technology and timing is what makes sabot and cluster bombs so effective? I doubt it.

A lot of handgun owners (and long-gun ones too) like to plink at things – This is non-specific target shooting, cans, golf-balls, water filled milk-cartons… It’s just fun shooting. It’s better to have a gun that holds a lot of bullets for this because it’s a pain in the arse to keep reloading. This is why I like bigger magazine capacities and it’s why most recreational shooters do too. Bullets are quite heavy and bulky and if you are carrying a gun hidden in your belt all day it’s probably best not to have 30 bullets in there. A Glock with a 30 round magazine may look cool in the movies but it’s not exactly very practical. Those things are generally for people who don’t have a clue how to shoot a gun and very doubtfully own it legally anyway. It’s very much a case of advertising over practicality.

On this same issue, I was watching a Youtube video that professed that a young girl had “OWNED” an anti-gun protestor by explaining why she needed a high-capacity magazine on her AR15 rifle that she kept for home defence. She cockily explained that because of the danger of all the people breaking into her house, to both rob and rape her, she needed at least 30 rounds in case she missed with the standard 5 or 10. As a gun owner and shooter, I was probably more appalled by this than the non-shooters who may think that she indeed has a point. If she is missing with 29 rounds, then where are these missing bullets with a range of a mile, in her built up area of wooden houses going? Why is this girl (who quite obviously can’t shoot) even allowed to have a gun and why isn’t she learning to shoot it?

When gun-owners talk to one another in forums devoted to self defence they NEVER talk about stuff like this – They want stopping power with just a very few accurately placed rounds from a concealed weapon that won’t hurt bystanders at all – They may be nutters, but they are generally pretty responsible nutters. It is a big mistake to lump these two groups together.

Stockpiling of ammunition can make people look somewhat deranged to the outside world and this is something I have been thinking about quite a lot lately too. A lot of the traditional view of stockpilers are the militias and the preppers who seem to think that they need 100,000 rounds of ammo for the end of the world or the day the government invades their stockade. I don’t think that is why most people stockpile.

There’s a few things about ammo I should explain to non-gun people. Firstly it’s not cheap. It’s made of brass, and powder and lead and manufactured to very exacting engineering specifications and what’s more; modern guns are demanding more and more exacting ammo. A round of 9mm was about 30 cents a couple of years ago, a round of .45 maybe 50 cents, and when you are looking at things like .44 Magnum rounds then you are talking a dollar or two per shot. Over this last year, ammo prices have gone somewhat mad and ammo is a surprisingly good investment – If you’d bought 100,000 rounds of ammo a couple of years ago, you could probably make 50-100% return on your investment if you had shopped and sold well – And that’s maybe a $50,000 profit in a couple of years. There IS a financial sense in stockpiling for investment.

At the moment in the US there seems to also be an issue with availability – Whether this is a deliberate shortage or an effect of the stockpiling I don’t know but it’s creating a situation where if people can get ammo then it’s well worth them buying more than they usually would simply because they may not find it available or cheap again for a while. Of course this all compounds and it’s creating more and more shortage and stockpiling. What will probably happen next year is that people will sell off their surpluses and things will calm down again. But yes.. Ammo isn’t cheap and it’s worth buying it when you find it cheaper than usual – Often at gun shows you can get a good deal on 1,000 to 10,000 rounds which seems a lot, but when you bear in mind that to keep quick and accurate with a handgun you should be shooting well over 1,000 rounds a year at paper targets – It’s not that strange at all.

Oddly I found myself accidentally stockpiling a while back – As the US prices started to go up I decided it was a good time to buy much more ammo at the lower prices than I usually would, and even cheap .22 plinking ammo I would find myself over-buying because the big stores were saying that they may have problems getting much more in the summer season. I would have hated to be out of plinking ammo so I bought much more than I usually would. I guess it can happen to anyone and it doesn’t mean that that somebody is stockpiling it for the end of the world or the next Russian Zombie invasion.

One little aside is that because of the price of ammo I have noticed that people at the places I shoot are shooting a lot less – I sometimes go to the range and don’t even bother getting any guns out at all if there is somebody there to chat to and drink tea with and I think this happens a lot in the shooting world (especially in Canada) – Even when I was at University I used to go the range for peace and quiet and to get away from the world – It’s a calm disciplined environment and a lot of shooting is rather like Yoga with a hefty recoil. But, as ever.. I digress.

The subject of “assault weapons” is one that only seems to come up in the USA – And it is one that I can see would annoy gun owners. I don’t know what an assault weapon is, and the only people who seem to know, in their own heads what an assault weapon is, are the anti-gun lobbyists. This really seems to be a big case where neither side understands the other side and neither side wants to do so. My assumption was that an assault weapon was a fully automatic rifle (a sub machine gun in other words) but this isn’t the case – Those are banned by law in most places in the USA anyway. As far as I can see, an assault rifle is just something that looks like it’s a military weapon. I may be missing something here but I have read a lot to find out.. And that seems to be it. Now Canada has a LOT of surplus military weapons – The most popular long-gun here may be the SKS which is a Russian post WW2 military rifle with a built in fold-away bayonet. It looks similar to the AK47 but without the big banana magazine and it’s not fully automatic. Nobody in their right mind in Canada would consider an SKS to be an “assault weapon” but by US anti-gun standards, it probably fits the bill perfectly.

Whilst the argument’s language and imagery is all about these mystical “assault weapons”, the meat of the argument is simply about magazine capacity and nothing at all to do with the gun that takes the magazines. A Canadian SKS can only hold 5 shots but it would be trivial for anybody with any gun skills and a few everyday tools (as in most gun owners) to modify it to take more. The anti-gun lobby doesn’t seem to understand guns and gun-owners enough to have a clue what they are really arguing about and the gun owners simply think that the other side are stupid.

As mentioned before the big problem with any of this is that criminals tend not to be law-abiding citizens. If you take a gun magazine that holds 30 rounds and you put a rivet into it to limit it to 10 – Then a law abiding shooter will probably not remove the rivet. Even if the legal shooter DOES remove the rivet (which anyone in Canada will tell you does happen, despite protestations that it is completely impossible), they are certainly not doing it for any dodgy reasons – They just want more shots at their tin-cans before they have to reload. The spirit of the law has gone wrong here because everybody knows that if somebody is going to go and commit a crime with a gun then they are not going to think twice about using illegally sized magazines or unregistered weapons. Of course thinking like this then encourages an imbalance between the newly restricted pro-gun-carry brigade and the unrestricted criminals and people who wouldn’t have dreamed of putting more than 10 shots in a gun before suddenly start wanting 30 “just because someone is trying to stop me”. Personally, I don’t think it’s even a real issue at all – A street kid who needs a 30 round magazine isn’t going to hit me with a well aimed shot; in fact testimony shows that they miss with all of them from very close ranges simply because they have never practiced and will be probably be shocked from being deafened with the first round too. Handguns are a lot harder to shoot than most people think. I, on the other hand, can hit them with a single shot.

There are many more issues that I haven’t covered – The ownership and popularity of companies in places like Nevada where you can go and shoot machine guns or bigger for fun – and as I said before, it is fun, and you can see that by the popularity of these places; despite the price. Should those be legal?

Then there is the “antique gun” issue where in places like the UK, a 100 year old gun is considered an antique and not a weapon – This means that the handgun I shoot every week, the Colt .45 (or just 1911 if we are being informal), has been technically legal in the UK for 2 years now – The M1911 Government Colt .45 Auto was, as the name suggests, first made in 1911. Even if I am not nitpicking (I think they have specifically legislated these types of weapons as illegal regardless of age now in response to this), then one of the other guns I shoot a lot, the Colt Navy revolver, which I find to be a devastatingly accurate and very powerful weapon is perfectly legal in the UK as an antique and is legal to shoot modern-reproductions on ranges too. Whilst the UK government may think that a black powder Colt revolver can’t kill people, I would imagine a whole Hollywood Western industry and one hell of a lot of dead Indigenous people and soldiers would beg to differ on that matter. Whilst a 6-shot Colt may not be the weapon of choice to hold up a bank, it still works pretty well (much better than a converted gas-revolver in fact, which was what I had that they banned). This all being said of course, If you don’t want to go that legal, expensive and quirky route to commit your criminal acts; then you could always just go and buy an illegal gun from half the pubs in Manchester for a few hundred quid and use that instead. It has the advantage that it’s cheaper that way too.

I decided this needed a photo, partly because I haven’t put a picture up in ages and partly because this was so long that you probably need a break!

(*) I am using the phrase “guns” because generally lay-people on both sides will understand this term. In a lot of circles a gun is more about artillery than something you carry (that is a firearm) – But I don’t want to confuse things using alien terminologies because that’s part of the problem. The same with bullets…

(**) For the last 13 years this has had the note “(This is mostly complete, it just needs a tidy edit)” at the top. I think at this point, I should accept that it is never goint to get one. I came back to this because I finally wrote a post on Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada.

How not to fire your Security Manager.

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If you have ever read my resume on this site you will notice that I passingly refer to being sacked from British Telecom three times. Occasionally people ask for the story of this, but since I was always covered by some weird ethical code / Non Disclosure Agreement and the like I have always kept quiet. It is now more than ten years since the final event so I feel it is a good time to tell the story – Mostly because it sadly amusing to see how one of the largest telecoms companies in the world could be quite so stupid. Part of the problem with writing this is that I don’t actually believe it myself. This may come across as a little bitter – It should do, because I am. I don’t think I come out too badly in this story so I am not too worried about telling it.

Firstly I must say that if I am being completely truthful I was only actually fired once, and this is about that event. The other two times I left it was a mutually agreed situation – In the first one, I told my managers that I flat out refused to lie for them any more and apparently in a company whose whole culture is based on lying to customers that is a bad thing – In the second case, I left because accounting every half hour I worked to a customer cost-centre (when it often made no sense at all) was just ludicrous and often downright dishonest. In both cases, as soon as I left my contract was immediately picked up by another part of BT with promises of various changes and a decent pay rise. I actually ended up with what was effectively a long unbroken lump of employment for BT, even though I worked for a few different divisions.

So let us go back to a time just before the last Millennium. I had just returned from a few months secondment building a new Internet Service Provider for BT’s new mobile company (Genie, now O2) and I had in my hand a glowing letter from the Chairman of Cellnet saying how wonderful me and my team were for delivering the impossible in such a short timescale. We did good on that job, even though I didn’t want to do it. Back at the office I was finally at the point of being part of the sign-off process for any solutions that BT sold to customers. In theory, before any solution was sold I got to security evaluate it first and could refuse to sign it off and send it back for design corrections if it failed. I was also working with internal security and in all I should have been happy; but I wasn’t. In the past I had been able to do what I wanted and what was best for BT and its customers as a whole – To be proactive and to look for problems that needed solving. Now I wasn’t allowed to breath without it being charged to a customer. Any autonomy I once had was gone and I was fixing things on my own time and not being paid for them which was getting somewhat ridiculous. I told my managers I was really not renewing my contract when it came up and I thought that was that.

A week before I was due to leave I got a call from BT Operations begging me to come and work for them. They piled on the sweeteners; a nice big pay rise, all my billing to a single cost centre, just two months and no more and I could move back to my favourite office. I agreed to this, I decided not to go ahead with another job I’d planned to move to and I made sure the paperwork was all sorted out.

The following Monday, I turned up at my new job and had a tea. The office was basically a football-pitch sized machine room that took up a whole floor of a building with just me and 2 operators in it. There were a few offices in there from the days that this was the major PSS centre for the UK but they had basically been abandoned Marie-Celeste like in the 80’s. I had worked here before when I worked on Genie and had made a little cubby-hole in a long since abandoned conference room, the two Operators had also moved in there.

At mid-day both the Ops got a call and vanished. I never saw them again. Nobody had told me what they wanted me to do so I just sat around drinking tea and watched machines humming. At 3pm I got a call from my new boss saying he was coming around at 4pm for a meeting. At about this point I attempted to login to the Operations Systems and it wouldn’t let me so I got a little suspicious and phoned some people. Nobody was saying much but somebody said they had heard that word from the board said they were about to fire me, but nobody knew why. I couldn’t find out any more so I sat and waited. My boss arrived at 4pm, and curtly told me I had been fired and he had to escort me out of the building. I asked why, he said he didn’t know, he’d just been told to do it. He asked for my security card which I didn’t have on me that day and that was that – I was standing outside the heavily armoured and razor-wired front gate and very confused.

The next day I expected to hear more. I didn’t – At least, I didn’t hear anything from my bosses but I did hear a lot from other parts of BT. I received mails asking me to review secure networks, I had calls from customers asking me how to repair things and I had calls from various people within BT wanting advice. I made excuses when I had to and just waited to hear something official.

A week went by. I heard nothing. No letter, not even an email. Nothing to tell me formally I had been sacked and nothing to tell me why. I contacted S-Com, my agency who were cagey (rightly so since they owed me a month’s salary in notice period). I am assuming they knew nothing and were keeping quiet hoping I wouldn’t notice that I was out of a job. I decided to contact a few people in BT and had a few shady meetings in pubs and BT canteens but the upshot was that nobody knew a thing. Nobody had been told I had been sacked, most people were astonished and assumed I was still working ther, I still had my fixed network connection into BT from my house and I could still access all of their systems except for one I had been deleted from and my mail addresses all still worked.

I decided to arrange a meeting with BT Internal Security, I was curious to know if they knew anything so I popped to Milton Keynes for dinner and we had a chat. They’d not heard a thing and even when they dug around they could find nothing. As far as they were concerned I was still working for BT. I asked them if I could see how much access I still had without them arresting me and they said sure as long as I wasn’t silly or naughty.

Over the next month I tested various networks. I could access all of the customers I ever worked on which included governments, law enforcement, most of the major banks, various ISPs and a whole load of internal things. I tested my card and my ability to just walk into a building – Nobody ever challenged me, I had a nice cup of tea in the room that housed the central Bank Clearing System and the national salary payment systems (CHAPS) and yes, I could still login to them. I could also wander into Telehouse and the like at any time I wanted. I was still getting many calls from customers and internal BT people and in the end I just pointed them at somebody else and didn’t explain why.

At this point, I was thoroughly pissed off. BT owed me nearly £10,000 and my agency S-Com (who had sent me a crate of champagne just 2 months earlier) claimed they knew nothing about it. I sent them a copy of the purchase order and the reference numbers but they just refused to reply after that. Nobody seemed to have a clue why I was fired they just know I was. There were various rumours but none of them really seemed right. It had just been ordered from on-high.

So we have one exceptionally disgruntled ex-security manager, who was owed money, who was being constantly ignored and treated like shit by BT and who still had access to every customer, internal system and building of importance. I had to change my phone number after six months, people were still calling me about things. It took them two years to disconnect my lines from my house into BT and to this day there may still be personal machines of mine housed on the internal networks that I can access. As far as I know, my card was never disabled and as far as I know, nobody in BT and certainly no customers were ever told I had stopped working there. My email address eventually stopped working in about 2004 when they changed systems.

To my credit, I never did anything to them – But that’s not really the point, I could have caused untold amounts of hugely embarrassing damage. I am not sure if relying on the continuing ethics of somebody you treat dismally is really a good policy but apparently in this instance it worked for them.

It’s at times like this I remember the old mantra:

“WE ARE THE TELEPHONE COMPANY. WE DON’T GIVE A FUCK”.

Please turn out the lights…

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I used to consider myself something of a nationalist. Not in the jack-booted send home all the blacks and “The Empire could do no wrong” sense, but certainly in the sense that deep down I believed that as a nation, The British are generally pretty cool. Admittedly, this is somewhat hard to defend given our history of invasion, genocide and miscellaneous rights abuses but even with all of these things against us, I would like to believe that there were at all times people in the county actively working against these things and ultimately correcting them.

Of all the people in the world unlikely to lose faith in Britain I would have put myself pretty high on the list; somewhere between Churchill and Thatcher maybe. So why do I want to leave? People keep asking me this so I started thinking of the reasons myself.

It’s not been a sudden decision although the last 10 years has hurried it a lot. So let’s think of some utterly random and disordered thoughts. This will be long, it will ramble, it will be rather typical of my weblog postings. As ever, you don’t have to read it. I am not forcing you to.

I remember cameras being one of the first things that pissed me off. When I was being trained in Surveillance one of the things we had to do was to start to be aware of who was watching us. I learned to look for cameras; this was a mistake. In 2006 there were over 4.2 million surveillance cameras in Britain, that was one for every 14 people. There are no statistics for the current number, but it has certainly increased. A report by Privacy International says that Britain is the worst Western Democracy at protecting individual privacy, in fact, in the world the only two countries worse than Britain are Malaysia and China. The cameras and other means of surveillance are there for various reasons including the often overlooked “US Security Operations”- Yup, the US is monitoring Britain on our own soil. Of course, whilst we are at this I was stopped and searched under the prevention of terrorism act a couple of years ago for taking photographs of Menwith Hill, a US surveillance station in the North of England which used to be a Cold War listening post and now spies on Europe for US commercial means. I should point out that taking photos of this place is not hard, it is visible from miles away, it is enormous and has been growing at a vast rate since the end of the Cold War when everybody assumed it would simply be closed.

They are not the only cameras I have issues with. Speed cameras are now a growing parasite on our roads. These things are operated by local police forces ostensibly as a safety measure but that myth has been debunked so many times that everybody knows it’s not true at all. They don’t add any safety, research shows that they actually have a tendency to make people speed more anyway and all they do is to make the police a fortune in fines. I have heard a theory that the Speed Camera is the single largest thing which has put a barrier between the police and the people in modern Britian. They make everybody a criminal, they make a majority of people hate and distrust the police and they make people subconsciously less willing to co-operate with a police force that seems to concentrate more on getting money from motorists than actually dealing with any crime at all. Of course, the modern British police force seems to be able to get away with shooting an unarmed man 8 times with no comeback on them so maybe it is good that we don’t trust them any more.

So I don’t trust the police… What about the rest of the authorities who run these surveillance operations. New legislation launched under the umbrella of making us safer from terrorists (of which much more later) is now being used by local authorities to spy on the general public for absolutely non terrorist activities. This came to light when Dorset Council admitted to spending more than 2 weeks spying on a family they suspected of lying on a school application form. The new surveillance powers granted by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 give local authorities access to things such as phone records, email information and monitor what web sites somebody is visiting as well as the right to mount on-the-ground physical surveillance against them. Needless to say, this act wasn’t ever created to allow this but what the hell, hey?

All of this makes the fact I do actually trust the British Security Services somewhat a moot point. I just thought since I was ranting about the misuse of such powers I’d actually carry on my fairly consistent defence of that lot. I also still have some respect for the higher judges, unfortunately this isn’t true of the lower court rabble.

Of course, the 2-type legal system is something else that annoys me although this has always been a problem so I can’t claim it to be any particular reason that I am leaving. We have, however, embraced the EU human rights convention and part of this is the right to a fair trial and the assumption that you are innocent until proven guilty. The British Criminal court system does operate on this assumption but the Civil Courts certainly don’t. Anybody can take somebody to Civil Court and it’s up to you to prove that you are innocent. In any case, the chances are you will end up paying a fortune in costs, win or lose.

The monarchy is one of the things often cited as a reason that Britain is so great. The relationship between the Crown and Government is a complicated one and much of it is governed by convention rather than actual laws. Maybe I am made more naive because I have more knowledge of how these conventions work than most but one of the things I always thought would happen when the government started to behave tyrannically and went against the will of the people in an overwhelming way (such as entering into an illegal war) was that the Crown would step in and do something about it. I would think that this is not only the right, but the very raison d’etre of the Queen. This is why we pay for them to live a life of opulence and luxury. When Blair invaded Iraq in 2003 (an act which we now know was based on lies to Parliament) an overwhelming majority of the British people opposed this blatantly illegal act and yet the Queen still allowed her seal to be used to send her armed forces to invade another country. This shouldn’t happen, this shouldn’t happen on so many levels. Of course, to add insult to injury on this matter, Tony Blair has never been taken to account for his various lies and his various crimes. He’s happily swanning around the world making a fortune on the lecture circuit without a care in the world. There are lots of groups trying to have him called to account but frankly, they seem to be pathetic and somewhat shit. If that’s all there is then he doesn’t have much to worry about at all.

Do I even need to talk about the fact that Parliament has now allowed the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days, without charge. The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? May as well just sell them all to Americans as pretty things to go into picture frames. Oh sorry, I forgot we already did that. Talking of the Magna Carta I note that the government is still trying to push ahead with its id card scheme. Europeans and Americans don’t really understand my objection to this but it’s quite important in that it does remove a very basic right given to us in the Magna Carta all those hundreds of years ago. We still have a presumption of innocence, we still have the right to be nameless and identyless in general life. If the police want to know who we are, they have to show good reason. An identity card will lose our right to anonymity, it will shift the power slightly further towards a state where we have to show our right to be here rather than the state assuming that right by default. I am ignoring the fact that as soon as we do get an identity card, the security will be cracked, the Russian Mafia will be selling fake ones for a few thousand a piece and the government will lose all the details on a train to Waterloo or post them on a DVD to somebody. We know this will happen, it’s just how these things go. I would start talking about this all being more steps towards Corpus Juris at this point but I don’t want to sound like a nutter from the UK Independence Party, I love Europe still though I am still not sure Britain should be part of it. I just have very different reasons for my beliefs than they do.

And now, we couldn’t avoid it could we. The climate of fear.

I don’t kid myself that I am much more clever than the average Brit and the only advantage I can think of is that my post graduation background was in social psychology with my PhD being in controlling people. Don’t get me wrong, I am as susceptible to control as anybody, I go out and buy Fox’s biscuits every time that damned panda on my TV tells me to. I am an advertisers dream; I fall for all the tricks and it’s made worse by the fact that I know it too. The thing is, I think that deep down most people know they are being manipulated and like me they don’t much care as long as it doesn’t play too much havock with their lives. Unfortunately, the latest big lies seem to be playing havock with mine, and everybody elses.

That odd chap Joseph Goebbels once wrote:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And so we come to The War On Terror. My government tells me that we are living in very dangerous times and that my personal rights and liberties should be forfeit little by little to help them fight it.

Bollocks.

My government tells me that this is the most dangerous time ever and my very life and existence and freedom is at stake through the threat of Terrorism.

Bollocks to the first bit. I will concede to the last bit – But the threat is not from Terrorists.

My government tells me that invading Afghanistan and Iraq is something they had to do because we are at war with Terrorists.

What the fuck?

I started to come of political awareness in the early 80’s. I am product of that time. At that time and for the next decade or so, there were lots of bombs all over Britain, planted by the IRA and paid for by the Americans. Do Americans know that as short a time ago as 1996, the IRA bombed England’s biggest skyscrapers? Do most people outside this country know that almost every day in London there were bomb scares, train, bus and tube disruptions and general upheaval because of bombs or the threat of bombs. I don’t know how many people lost their lives through IRA bombs, I don’t know how many bombs there were. The reported numbers almost certainly don’t match the reality because the government and the press rather sensibly co-operated to keep a lot of the incidents quiet so as not to give publicity to terrorists. That is how a country with a lot of experience of terrorists works, they realise that terrorism feeds off publicity and taking that away from them helps to damage its impact. Our new enemy (which apparently now has a name, it is militant Islam) has, in the last few years made what amounts to a pathetically small impact on the country in terms of actual bombs and lives lost and yet we never hear anything else! Liberties are lost every month as we do more and more to fight this new thing, Terrorism. Have I missed something here? New thing? Terrorists in Britain? Get real!

In the early 80’s I didn’t think we’d make it to the year 2000 and I very much doubt I was alone. We were having leaflets posted through the door of every house in the country telling us how to survive in the aftermath of a Nuclear War and it was a time when films like When The Wind Blows and Threads were able to change British public opinion on the whole nuclear warfare issue. We slowly started to realise that we probably wouldn’t survive global nuclear war but these still seemed to be a greater than 50% chance that it would happen. My government tell me that I am at greater risk now from a bunch of disorganised terrorists?

HA FUCKING HA!

The weird thing is that like Goebbels great lies, it doesn’t seem to be global. It seems to be rather restricted to Britain and the USA. Its an excuse to go to war to further commercial interests abroad, it’s an excuse to step closer to that Governmental Holy Grail, a total and legal control of the people. The two are Hand in hand, this is a dangerous situation for us to be in and I don’t like it. This “war” is costing us hundreds of billions of pounds and although I realise it’s cliche to count this in how many hospitals we could have built with the money it is worth pointing out that Britain’s filthy hospitals and the superbug epidemic are causing far far more deaths in this country than any terrorist activity ever will.

The other great lie is to do with Global Warming. Don’t switch off, don’t sneer at me. I am not saying that Global Warming is a lie, it’s not. There are differences of opinion as to what is causing Global Warming and I doubt you agree with me but even so, Global Warming has become a bandwagon to impose even more taxes and controls on the people and as I have ranted about in the past; the people it is hurting most are the poor. I foresee more and more happening in the name of global warming; I foresee more and more silly laws and restrictions and less and less useful action. Global warming will be used as an excuse to sell more and more protected land to companies to exploit and sell more and more overpriced houses to people. The poor will stay in the lowland floodable areas and will end up uninsurable and like New Orleans but on a grander scale we’ll probably end up with refugees in Mainland Britain in a decade or two. Adding more and more tax to plane travel and fuel isn’t going to help this. Putting some of those billions of pounds we are spending to protect our freedom is. Global Warming is inevitable. Taxes aren’t going to stop it. Preventing it isn’t going to work. We should be doing something about it, and doing something about it now, not later. It’s a big lie. We all know this why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Leigh visited England from Canada a few weeks ago and said that one of the things she noticed most about this country was the press. I have to admit I had barely noticed this but now it’s been pointed out to me I see the point. I am not sure what has happened to it, it’s not a press any more it is just popularist celebrity drivel interspersed with bigoted opinion. I don’t read newspapers any more so I hadn’t really noticed. and whilst I can’t use this as a reason for leaving I can still mourn its passing.

The BBC still sits on the sidelines as the only party of opposition; uncomfortably though it relies on the government for funding so its subversion is probably rather less than one would hope. I view it as some sort of ineffectual superhero that still tries hard. By day, it broadcasts endless mind numbing gobshite devoted to cookery, decorating, selling all your crap to buy new crap and buying new houses – All the things we as new-age sheep seem to like. By night, it allows platform to some quite cutting satire and the occasional excellent documentary that says much the same as I am saying here only in a less self-obsessed way. The other channels generally broadcast cheap and easy to make crap and reality TV. It’s depressing really and if this is the opium of my nation then I demand a new pusher.

And now for the punchline. None of this is why I want to leave…

The country has had messes before, England and Britain have a long history and throughout it, lots of shit has happened. But as I said at the start of this post; I have always felt that behind the scenes there were competent people working to mend things. Of course, the English have a history of being quite pathetic and resistant to change, our history of revolution is pitiful; from the rather pathetic Peasants Revolt which ended with a single blow to the Civil War which simply annoyed a bunch of people before sending everything back to how it was before as soon as the leaders realised they didn’t have anything to do once they’d won. There’s no spirit left in this country any more. Nobody cares; the people aren’t stupid, they know what is happening as well as I do but they don’t seem to care any more. Even the few who do can’t do much. Armed revolution is conveniently illegal and political revolution is, as I see it, impossible. Maybe it has always been that way, maybe this is something I have missed.

The only useful things that the Brits have ever really done to create change is to leave. For the first couple of centuries at least I don’t think we did so badly in America. Australia looks pretty to me and I think we have done pretty well in Canada, all things considered. Maybe it will be interesting to see how the Colonies have fared instead of constantly whining about what the Motherland has become.

Will the last one to leave the country please turn out the lights? Global Warming, don’t you know.

Some links – I didn’t want them in the main text because I am odd that way:

Britain is ‘surveillance society’
Police shot Brazilian eight times
Council Spy Cases hit 1000 a month
The Magna Carta
The Bill of Rights
42 Days later…
UKIP on Corpus Juris
The BBC’s The Power of Nightmares – You really should watch it here.

The Information Superhighwayman

All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured.