Everything you need to know to keep your guns safe Ed Burlew is a lawyer from Thornhill, Ontario who s on a mission. It s a struggle that keeps him, and a loose coalition of like-minded lawyers, dashing from courtroom to courtroom rescuing bewildered clients and reuniting them with their confiscated firearms. He finds it a frustrating process, in part because his clients aren t professional criminals they re ordinary law-abiding Canadians who run afoul of a welter of complex firearms laws, red tape and arbitrary police action. A shooter himself, Burlew got into firearms law a few years ago when my friends, the shooters, were getting dumped on in the courts and I realized there was a gap here.
Few lawyers are hunters or shooters, and no one was specializing in the field.
He currently receives eight to ten phone calls a week from gun-owners, and appears in court three or four times on firearms cases. Sometimes, he says, legal tangles and the quirks of licence administration and regulations can be sorted out with a letter or two. But he says it s all a little like playing the board game Snakes and Ladders, without the ladders. Burlew expects his workload will continue to increase as staggered portions of Canada s newest firearms law, Bill C-68, the Firearms Act, come into effect. This, he says, is complex law, much of it yet untested in the courts.