Canada’s gun control regime is more stringent than that of the United States. This is easily explainable to American eyes after taking a quick look at a list of the Prime Ministers of Canada: just check the party affiliations beside their names. Yes, “Liberal” mean substantially the same thing in Canada as it does in America.

But there are two other reasons as well; the second might surprise you. The first is that Canada is more urbanized than the United States; it’s almost a sure bet that the reach of the gun control statute doesn’t extend too far into rural areas. The second reason, though, is because of the relatively high prestige of the police force in Canada.

One of the more detailed illustrations of the opinion that gun control is necessary for a well- behaved community is in The Blue Wall: Street Cops In Canada, chronicles of then-current police work published in 1983 by an unabashedly pro-police writer named Carsten Stroud. The relevant chapter traces the location of a gun which went from the home of an unregistered owner to the evidence table in a shooting trial: it got “into play” by being stolen from that home.

This is one of those political discordancies, with respect to the United States, shared by Canadians that make us somewhat exotic in an American community: the stout-hearted advocate of gun control is likely also to be an equally staunch law-and-order man or woman. I’m not quite convinced that this is what the typical American means by the term “liberal Republican.”

Given that the licensing requirements are also stringent [Here you go if you’re curious], typical Canadians confine their thoughts of gun ownership to dreams mixed in with reveries based upon Western films – little more than fantasies.

I myself did own a sort of gun – a sawed-off flintlock pistol, of all things. Any owner of a real gun would classify it as a toy; the thing could not even be loaded with bullets. I don’t think I’ll shock anyone by disclosing that it was never fired. (Sadly, I lost it, along with a luggage bag, in the city of Ottawa in 1997.)

Given this earlier purchase and the loopholes which exist in the United States’ FFA Act, it would be a sensible guess that I’d be heading over to a gun auction site I registered with (for the sole purpose of buying a flag that was listed there) to gawp over the antiques.

Unfortunately, perhaps, Canada’s development was quite different from America’s. Instead of the West being untamed land which went through the two-stage process of being declared a territory and then, once sufficiently organized, being accepted as a new State by the national level of government, Canada’s unorganized land was all owned long before it was settled. The legal owner of the entire Canadian frontier was the Hudson’s Bay Company, who got a grant of that land from the British Sovereign. (For part of Canada’s colonial history, some of the wilderness was owned by the now-defunct North- West Company, which merged with the Bay long ago.) This type of history does not lend itself well to a young boy dreaming of holding off “Black Knife” with Rin Tin Tin by his side; it jibes more with a boy dreaming about being a good Scout by doing his “Sentry-Go” duty like a man.

With ownership under the grant of the Crown came the power to regulate. There was law in the Canadian frontier before there were even people there, and the presence of a large company acting as a quasi-government, and the habit of other large companies sending representatives into new settlements right after the first pioneers arrived (our big banks), the Galbraithian model of the economy, which may seem a little weird to many Americans, makes intuitive sense to a resident Canadian. There is that two-tier division in the economy of Canada which always gets small businessmen, cast as below-the-salt, dreaming of selling out to one of the large corporations in their field, who are definitely thought of as above the salt. That’s why so many Canadian info-entrepreneurs sell out to “the Man” long before they become large in terms of employees hired.

So if there’s anything I’d be drooling over, it would be a musket – a firearm from the days before bullets. A pistol or rifle from the days of fur trappers and lonely explorers in Canada - which was the only “wild frontier” we ever had.