[center][b][blue][size=4]Gun-law foe posts officials' photos on Web[/b][/blue][/size=4][/center]

[b]Shooter denies any threat implied[/b]

[b]Tim Naumetz
The Ottawa Citizen[/b]

An Ottawa sport shooter who vehemently opposes the federal government's controversial gun law has posted photographs of Canadian Firearms Centre employees on his gun-lobby Web site, followed by a sobering picture of a deadly .50-calibre sniper's rifle.

Even though the photographs are accompanied by the names, telephone numbers and workplace addresses of the employees, the gun owner who posted them, Tom Zinck, a Canadian Alliance organizer in the last federal election, denies they are intended as a threat or intimidation.

Mr. Zinck says he simply put the photos on his Web page to help gun owners contact the firearms centre.

"A lot of people have been dealing with these people over the phone and it's always nice to put a picture to a voice, that was sort of why I did it," Mr. Zinck, who owns a .45-calibre handgun and several rifles and shotguns, said in an interview.

"I had a lot of people contacting myself, asking 'who do I contact, what's the phone number, who do I contact to get help?' " he explained. "So I thought I would put it up."

Asked why he followed the photo series up with a picture of a powerful .50-calibre rifle, Mr. Zinck replied: "It's a really cool rifle." He acknowledged the gun on his site is configured as a sniper's rifle, single-shot, with a stand and a scope, and that the rifle, while legal for civilian ownership, is useless for hunting because its armour-piercing bullets would pulverize any prey.

Despite Mr. Zinck's statement that he posted the photographs to help gun owners deal with the bureaucracy of the new licensing system, his site identifies the firearms staff as people working "behind the scenes." A government official confirmed the employees do not generally deal with the public.

The Web site is eerily similar to inflammatory anti-abortionist Web sites in the United States that targeted doctors who performed abortions and have been seen as death or injury threats.

Still, neither police nor federal Justice Department officials have asked Mr. Zinck about the site over the two years it has existed. He says he photographed the Firearms Centre employees while they were at an information booth the centre set up at a fair near Cornwall.

Mr. Zinck, a computer software engineer who worked for Nortel Networks until he was laid off last January, said his computer has logged RCMP and Justice Department computers entering the site daily since he set it up.

An aide to Justice Minister Anne McLellan said Ms. McLellan was unaware of the site until told about it by a reporter this week. Press aide Farah Mohamed said Ms. McLellan is "obviously concerned" about the material on the site. "Having just learned about it, and obviously being concerned about it, we are determining what the next steps are," added Mr. Mohamed.

Ottawa police would not comment on the site, or other possible threats against firearms centre personnel or gun-control advocates, because it does not comment on investigations or any complaints unless charges are laid, said spokeswoman Carol Ryan.



[center][b]PAGE 1[/b][/center]

This has already been posted once before

well since the guy is based out of the states there nots much that will happen to him except maybe getting harrased.

Officials with the Canadian Firearms Centre would not comment on the Web site or any threats employees have received, even though some of the five employees pictured on Mr. Zinck's site are "uncomfortable" with the situation.

The head of Canada's largest gun-control lobby group also declines to discuss in detail threats that have been received over the new law, commonly known as C-68 from its legislative designation while going through Parliament in 1994 and 1995.

Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, said she does not want to encourage what she calls "fringe elements" of the gun lobby by generating public attention and discussing threats in detail.

Several police investigations are under way into anonymous threats that have been made against gun-control advocates or federal employees.

Increasingly, as with the escalating rhetoric among ardent opponents of C-68 in the firearms lobby, intimidating messages and their content are clearly of U.S. origin, added Ms. Cukier. Some of the messages have included references to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber executed in the United States last June, as a martyr.

The reliance on U.S. pro-gun arguments was illustrated last week when Canadian Alliance MP Rahim Jaffer

introduced libertarian writer Vin Suprynowicz, a Las Vegas columnist who authored Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, at an Edmonton gun-lobby event billed as "The Case Against Gun Control."

"We get a lot of hate mail on the Web site, we get threatening phone calls and increasingly it's coming from the United States, not just from Canada," said Ms. Cukier.

A leading spokesman for the pro-gun lobby group, Canadian Institute for Legislative Action, founded three years ago with help from the Washington-based National Rifle Association, complained last week that Ottawa police visited him at his home without notice while investigating threats against gun-control activists last April.

Al Dorans, the institute's director of operations and author of hundreds of letters to newspapers over the gun law, said he was outraged because the police detectives asked him if he knew who made the threats.

"We don't support criminal activities," Mr. Dorans said. He fired off a blistering letter to Ottawa police chief Vince Bevan saying the visit implied police believe "law-abiding members of the recreational firearms community might stoop to illegal acts."

Mr. Zinck, in an article published by the National Firearms Association, a group in which he serves as executive vice-president communications for Ontario, says he began his campaign after he and his wife were searched and interrogated for 90 minutes at the Canadian border while returning from a gun show in Syracuse, New York, two years ago because of a handgun part he had purchased at the show.

He says he later won a small out-of-court settlement after suing the OPP and Canada Customs for wrongful detention, anguish and mental suffering because, among other things, officers would not let his pregnant wife go to the washroom during the interrogation.

"This was the turning point in my activism," writes Mr. Zinck, 29.

[center][b]page 2[/b][/center]

Sorry for delay,I'm having computuer problems tonite.[:(]

The man has had his site up for 2 years with those pictures, if someone was going to get killed it would have already happened.