Without knowing the case, this is the main reason I gave up my guns. Early on in this there was a case where there was a black fugitive in TO, he was eventualy arrested in Florida. There was another black man who happened to have a white girlfriend. A neighbour resented this fact and claimed black man 2 was the fugitive, or maybe he believed it. The Police guys kicked down the doors of the girlfriend's family, pointed machineguns at everyone in the middle of the night, etc... The family had a son who had recently died. He had left a stash of dope (not traffiking size I think), and a .22 lying around. The family (some person presumably) was charged with unsafe storage! Just think of that. Yet of course the police were completely justified. These charges were dropped.

Another case involved an Ottawa man whose wife found kiddie porn on her husband's computer. She called the police, and they charged him with unsafe storage of firearms, knowing kiddie porn charges are very hard to make. Fair enough. It did make me think that next time you want to divorce a guy, just download some kiddie porn onto his computer, and take a few guns out of the safe, and call the cops! Done deal. Of course in this particular case, I never heard that suggested, or never heard the outcome for that mater.

But people often ask why do we care if there are gun rules, there are car rules afterall. Yet you never hear of coercive prosecutions of people who speed dangerously on the 401. Leave an unloaded, partial, unfireable, firearm lying around, and you might as well forget it. If you're on the registry database, then they can basically kick down your door whenever.

It's important to remember that the safe storage rules were brought in by the Conservatives, not the Liberals. It's a toss-up I guess, but I think they are every bit as big a deal as the registry. They were very costly, forcing everyone to buy safes, though that is probably a good thing. They also basically outlawed all primary uses of firearms, like self-defence, since it's hard to make the urgency case if you have to seperately lock up firearms and ammo. And they opened a lot of inatentive owners to coersive prosecutions.