Sporting arms association says members stuck between a rock and a hard place
The Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association (CSAAA) sheds more light on why it signed a treaty with the federal government to specify how retailers who carry banned firearms can be compensated.
The agreement is part of the first phase of Ottawa’s arms buyback program, which was unveiled on Wednesday.
Wes Winkel, the president of CSAAA, told Gormley Thursday that members of the association are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“We have a situation where we have millions and millions of dollars in inventory that we were told with the stroke of a pen overnight that we couldn’t sell,” he said.
“We had no way of disposing of them and now for the last three years we’ve had to stockpile them, pay for insurance, continue to deal with regulatory inspections and our dealers are frustrated and tired of the situation.”
Winkel said gun shops had no other way to deal with banned guns still in their inventory and said he felt if the CSAAA didn’t interfere, the government would simply have chosen a different group.
“We could have said, ‘No, we’re not going to have this discussion and crush the salt,'” he added. “We felt it was better to hold our noses and have the conversation than to have something dictated to us over which we have no control.”
The total amount of the contract could reach $700,000, but the president said the CSAAA has not received any money from it so far.
Winkel said a huge project like this could not be accomplished without funding from the federal government, which would allow the CSAAA to hire staff and pay for office space.
“We are a volunteer board. We have business to run every day. We can’t just take the time to organize all this,” he said.
Winkel noted that Ottawa still hasn’t told the CSAAA how much it’s willing to pay gun shop owners for the banned firearms.
“It’s a very complex situation. Of course, we charge storage fees and insurance costs for storing these things and are now looking for the inflation rate,” Winkel said.
“If we had invested that money in other products, we would have been profitable with it.”
Winkel said the CSAAA has made it very clear publicly and to Federal Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino that it does not want to be involved in the expected buyback of banned weapons from private owners.
“We support our consumers’ right to own these things. We don’t want to be part of that at all. We just want to make sure we have representation for the firearms that are in our businesses,” he said. “We have no desire to be collection agencies on behalf of the government.”
CSAAA’s deal with Ottawa has created some turbulence within the association, Winkel noted.
“We had some disagreements within the ranks,” he said. “The issue of firearms is of course an extremely emotional topic and unfortunately some people have used terms like ‘traitors’ and things like that because we have conversations with ‘the enemy’,” Winkel said.
– With files from The Canadian Press