Canadian legal threat to paintball averted

How the paintball world proactively worked together to avoid a catastrophe

Back on April 1, 2001 we received word that a new bill introduced to the Canadian parliament, Bill C-15, may end paintball in Canada. The bill would seemingly reclassify firearms as objects designed to expel a projectile at faster than 500 feet per second and over 5.7 Joules.

The Splatter Times went to work. We designed a quick email form, entered the top 100 Canadian officials names and email addresses into a database, and wrote a script that can take all of the information put it together in nice personalized emails to all the parliament members.

The result was an avalanche of emails being sent out to the Canadian parliament. Over 10,000 emails were sent out in a span of just a few days to Canada’s top lawmakers.

The paintball community had finally come together in a unified effort to inform Canada’s legislators to make corrections or clarify the bill’s consequences.

We received letters by email and by land mail from many of Canada’s leaders acknowledging the threat to the paintball industry and or giving us more information. Most of them were overly concerned and agreed with our sentiments.

The Canadian Firearms Centre [sic] even sent us a very detailed letter outlining why paintball should not be threatened by this bill. We were satisfied.

Paintballers rejoice! We have made a difference, not only on the American political scene, but now even on the Canadian one.

The Canada paintball threat is over for now.