Brad Haugli says his uncle would be alive today if a program like the provincial Gun Amnesty Month had been accessible to his family.
Haugli's uncle used to hunt and owned a rifle legally. As time went on his uncle stopped hunting and the gun went unused in his home. Over the years, things in his uncle's life changed, culminating to his eventual suicide using the rifle he still had in his home.
"If my father and other family members, his wife, anybody, would have known that there's an ability to turn in that firearm ... to the police to dispose of it, then my uncle would probably be alive today," he said.
Haugli, president of the British Columbia Association of Chiefs of Police and an inspector with the Lower Mainland branch of the RCMP, is a strong supporter of gun amnesty programs and said that it gives people the chance to turn in any guns they may no longer want or use.
"What we want to do is to provide residents an opportunity to turn in any unwanted firearms," he said.
Simon Fraser University professor emeritus Gary Mauser, who is an anti-gun registry advocate, released a statement denouncing the gun amnesty program because it improperly targets gun owners who may not want to give up their firearms.
"It is poor policy for the police to ask citizens to surrender potentially valuable firearms without offering reimbursement," Mauser said in the release.
In a phone interview with The Record, Mauser said the police should offer alternatives to simply turning in unwanted firearms. Many old firearms, especially riffles could potentially be valuable and be sold to gun clubs or donated to museums, he added.
What's more, Mauser said the campaign is highly unlikely to have an impact on violent crime because criminals won't be turning in their guns to police.
But that's not the intention behind the gun amnesty program, Haugli said.
The spirit of the gun amnesty is to make homes safer," he said. "It's not about we're going to get criminals to turn in their guns, it's about making our community safer."
Safer by removing weapons people may not know how to use or may not want.
Another case Haugli won't soon forget involved the handing down of an old gun to a teenage boy some years ago. The teen was given the gun by a family member and was keeping it in his room fully loaded when one of his friends came by for a visit. Not knowing it was a real gun or loaded he proceeded to fool around with it.
"(Taking) his own life accidentally by sticking it in his mouth and pulling the trigger thinking it's a joke," Haugli explained.
"If we would have had those firearms turned to us, or if they knew they could turn in those firearms to police to dispose of, never to be on the streets again ... then those people could be alive today," he added.
Again Haugli said the program is completely voluntary and that police aren't forcing people to turn in their guns. It's only meant to give those who want to get rid of weapons a safe way of doing so, he said.
In Burnaby, the RCMP have yet to release the final number of guns turned in to the detachment, but three weeks into the program the RCMP had already collected about 680 firearms from across the province.
