I'm applying for a shotgun license on antidepressants
Reflections on applying for a PAL in Canada, with depression in my medical record
[Content notice: firearms, suicide]
In January of 2023 I submitted my PAL (Possession and Acquisition License) application. This license allows you to own an unrestricted firearm in Canada, which in practice means rifles and pistols. My motivation was simple: I had gone on supervised clay shoots a few times in the UK with a family friend, and I liked it. Doing a physical skill-testing, casually scored thing out in nature is fun. (Think of it as golf with guns.) I wanted to do more of it, and having a license means being able to bring your own gun, instead of renting from the range.
The application process is non-trivial: you must provide two character references who will attest to the accuracy of the statements on your application. It asks whether you have recently suffered a relationship breakdown. It asks whether you have been treated for any mental health conditions in the last five years. The goal is to ascertain two things: are you the kind of person who will responsibly store, transport, and handle a gun? And can you be trusted to use them for the only two legal purposes1 that most civilians are allowed to use them: hunting and target shooting?
My application was rejected for the silliest of reasons: the photo I had submitted was not up to spec. (Turns out the requirements for a PAL photo are just a little different from the requirements for a passport photo. Who knew?) Life got busy, time passed, and the period for re-submitting a new photo expired. In June of 2024, my father mentioned that it might be fun to go clay shooting with me, so I took the exam again. I passed. And then I remembered the questions about relationship breakdowns, and about having received mental health treatment in the last five years.
In January of 2023, I could truthfully answer no to these questions. In June of 2024, that was no longer the case.
In March of 2023, I finally sought medical help for what most people would call “a bout of depression” that had been slowly growing in severity over the prior 6 months. The most obvious trigger was the slow unraveling of a relationship that had shaped my life for over a decade, but everyone who’s been depressed knows that such things are simply the spark that detonates a pile of things which have been at risk of implosion for years. I use quotation marks because depression is such an ill-defined thing that it seems semantically irresponsible to say that a person has depression, in the same way that someone has a cold, or an infection. There is no viral or biological agent to detect. Is it pathological to feel like your world has collapsed when you lose the person, the house, and the life that you’ve built for the better part of a decade? What kind of person would feel okay in such a situation? Who decides what emotions are appropriate in this case, and how long they should last?
The most common diagnostic tool for depression is something called the PHQ-9. It is a series of nine questions on things like being tired, having poor appetite, or feelings of worthlessness. I remember filling out such a questionnaire when I first went to the student mental health service back in undergrad; I remember answering the question about thoughts of “being better off dead or of hurting yourself” dishonestly, because I wasn’t sure what would happen if I stated the truth. (Would they contact my parents? Would I be withdrawn from classes? Better not take the risk.) I remember, to my great bemusement, the triage nurse telling me the good news that “it seems you’re not feeling depressed or suicidal”, as if she had just looked at an x-ray and confirmed that my bones weren’t broken.
One could argue that in doing so, I was getting in the way of my own well-being. How could I expect the nurses and psychologists at the student health clinic to help, if I wasn’t going to be honest with them about what is going on? But part of the stigma associated with being honest about your state of mental health is that you run the risk of being treated as a person who should no longer be given agency and choice. I wanted help, but I didn’t want it at the expense of sending my parents into unhelpful hysterics, or at the expense of academic progress. (Every functional depressive out there knows very well that it is possible to do - heck, even excel - at your job or your studies while being depressed. It might be the only thing preventing your descent into further madness).
When I realized that I would need to check the boxes regarding relationship breakdown and mental health treatment on my second PAL application, I felt angry. I briefly considered the possibility of omitting the truth. I just as quickly decided that I did not want to discover the consequences of lying to the federal government. There are some situations in life which merit fucking around and finding out; a legal document pertaining to firearms usage is probably not one of them.
Thus I was angry that the details of my relationship and my mental health struggles over the last year and a half would now be up for scrutiny by a bureaucratic stranger. I was angry because I’d almost certainly have to ask my prescribing doctor for a note to indicate that I was of sound mind. I was worried that no physician would be willing to take on the risk of signing off on a PAL, and then later discovering that their patient had shot themselves.
Make no mistake: there is ample evidence that removing access to lethal means is an extremely effective way to reduce suicide rates - especially for attempts that occur in moments of impulse and extreme emotional distress. Anybody who has struggled with mental health, depression, and thoughts of suicide should evaluate the risks of gun ownership, and they should do this evaluation with gravity and honesty. But I was wary of the idea that an RCMP officer or a doctor might be deemed more capable of assessing this risk than myself.
To the relief of my inner libertarian, I have not yet encountered resistance. My doctor didn’t feel the need to dig into the details of my personal struggles. She recommended that I think about safety valves, such as having a licensed friend who could store my firearm if I ever felt uncomfortable with having it around. Based on how I had been doing over the past year, she said that she had no overt concerns, and would simply answer any questions posed by the RCMP honestly and to the best of her ability. I’m curious what questions I’ll receive from the officer who picks up my application, and how deeply they’ll pry.
It’s important for current and future gun license holders to know that a past history of mental health struggle is not necessarily going to be a non-starter. It would be good to know that a medical history will not necessarily result in a bureaucratic nightmare, or a gross invasion of privacy by a stranger who will drag you through the most vulnerable and painful parts of your life story.
This is important because asking for help with mental health struggles is already hard enough. After all the hooplah about “Bell Let’s Talk” and “Mental Health Awareness Month”, this fact remains: our society is deeply, deeply uncomfortable with struggle. We still prize confidence, and resilience, and a relentlessly cheerful attitude. Weakness is shameful. Vulnerability is shameful. Failure is shameful. Struggling is shameful.
I have no way to prove this, but I’d be willing to bet that the biggest difference between people who have depression on their medical record and people who don’t is not whether they’ve been depressed. It’ll be whether or not the person has asked for help. The worst possible system of regulation around gun ownership and mental health would be one that discourages current and future gun owners from seeking medical help if they believe that it will jeopardize their future ability to own firearms. Given that 90% of suicide attempts using firearms result in death, the population of gun owners who are facing mental health struggles are disproportionately harmed by any force that reduces their likeliness of seeking help.
My doctor reminded me that 1 in 3 people in Canada are facing some kind of mental health struggle. Far more of us stare over the edge of the balcony than we'd like to admit. At the end of the day, it is only the person who has passively or actively ideated suicide who knows, in their heart of hearts, how close they have come to actually doing it. Every person who has ever sought help for suicidal thoughts will have been asked to create a safety plan. If you ever encounter a moment when you can’t trust yourself to stay safe, what will you do?
There is a level of seriousness and immediacy with which you must take this question when you consider bringing something as lethal as a gun into your home. I’ve personally considered several options for risk reduction. Perhaps I will never keep any ammunition at home, and only ever buy ammunition at the gun range, for immediate use. Perhaps I will keep two locking mechanisms in place, and the combination for one of them will only ever be known by my partner. (That’s a hell of a responsibility to place on another human being - you’d really want to have a serious heart-to-heart about such an arrangement.) Perhaps, after much reflection, I will conclude that I simply shouldn’t own a gun at all.
But keeping that choice in my hands - in the context of relationships that I have built, physical places that I occupy, and risks that I understand - is a life-affirming piece of agency that should not be compromised lightly. Suicide is arguably not about wanting to die, but about wanting the pain of existence to stop - and seeing no other way out. To remove somebody’s agency in such a dilemma is to negate the sovereignty of an individual who is already questioning the value of their own existence. It should be exercised with extreme care.
I’ve heard it said that virtue is not weakness, but knowing that you have the capacity to do wrong and still choosing not to do so. I can think of few things as life-affirming as knowing that you have the capacity to end your own life, but that you won’t. You’ll choose to structure your home, your space, your relationships, and your own mind - such that you will not choose to do so. The person removing this choice should not be the government, the RCMP, the doctor, or the therapist. It should be yourself.
#147
The only other legal usage of firearms in Canada is that which is required by a profession (i.e. law enforcement). Contrary to popular belief, legally owning and storing a gun would not provide much in the way of self defense, mostly because Canada’s storage laws (locked, trigger disabled, and stored away from ammunition) would render a shotgun or rifle rather useless in the case of something like a home invasion. (It’s dark, it’s 2am, and you’ve just woken up - how fast can you open a lock, search for ammo, and load a firearm in such circumstances?) And if that’s not a sufficient hassle, the ensuing legal battles to prove that you used reasonable force certainly will be, for both your time and your pocketbook.