Swanson Jeremy, Ottawa

But according to notes from police, the weapons had not been securely locked up when they were called in to investigate. Though it had been months since he had been in the house, Swanson's wife led officers to a machete under the bed she shared with her husband (he maintains it had always been in the garage with the camping equipment), as well as other knives in the room. Bayonets from both world wars were found in various rooms. The bomb squad was called in after police misidentified a bag of empty brass shell casings as a "bag of loose ammunition lying on the floor," according to officers' notes, and an inert hand grenade--which previously had sported the humorous label: "For service, please pull pin"--was identified by police as a live bomb. BB guns were seized and logged as rifles and a replica seventeenth-century musket, the kind that hangs over the fireplace, was recorded as an "assault weapon." The gun safe in the basement was open, though Susan Swanson was in possession of both sets of keys. The entire collection was labeled a "mini-arsenal." Records show that Susan Swanson phoned and requested the firearms be removed because of her "fear" of them. "So what is meant by 'fear' if the guns are locked away and she's lived with them like that for years?" asks Terrance Green, Swanson's lawyer. "What fear could she have when she knew she had the only keys [to the safe]?"

Police would later correct the erroneous details in their report, but Swanson says his estranged wife exploited his hobby of collecting military paraphernalia to paint a picture of him as an aggressive gun nut--even though he had no prior criminal record and there is no record of any domestic violence (Susan Swanson and her lawyer both declined to be interviewed for this story). It was the children's psychologist who recommended that authorities seize the weapons, because, according to police documents, she feared a "murder-suicide situation," although she had never examined Swanson himself. Another psychologist, after interviewing Susan, recommended the firearms not be returned to Swanson due to his "psychological status." "Both these psychologists made statements that influenced action by the police and yet I was never their patient and had never been examined by them at any stage," Swanson says. "How were they qualified to make such damning and influential statements?" According to a report from Ottawa psychiatrist Dr. Anne Galipeau, who examined Swanson, the former bureaucrat posed "no danger to himself or others."

After the weapons' seizure, Swanson was ordered to appear before a judge on a police submission that he be declared a "dangerous person" by the court. "I was surrounded by drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, armed robbers, and even a man in chains, defending my character without a charge being levelled against me," he says. The judge found that there was no evidence to have him declared dangerous and ordered the firearms and all confiscated items returned to him. His police record, however, still identifies him as a Category 4--the same level as those guilty of assault and bank robberies.

Painting gun owners as unstable potential threats is part of a trend in nasty separation battles, explains one family lawyer, who asked not to be identified. "In an ugly divorce, the first thing you have to do is put the spouse in a bad light," she says. "A common question is, 'Has there ever been any sexual abuse of the children, has he ever threatened you, ever hit you, anything you're scared of, can you even insinuate that he threatened you? Then we can probably get him out of the house and have him look bad in a court battle." The ethics walk a fine line, she adds. "You don't say, 'Make it up,' but, 'Looking back, can you, in hindsight, say it may have been construed as a threat?"

Men's advocate Tamas Koplyay, who works as a management professor at the Universite du Quebec, says it's all part of the business of divorce these days. "Making daddy look bad is the grand strategy for getting sole custody," he says. With custody rights, he says, ex-wives can ensure they have their hands "on the cash machine for life." In Canada, says Koplyay, the government's gun-control zeal has resulted in a vilification of gun owners. "Gun registry laws are a key weapon in creating guilt by association." Ross Bailey, an executive-at-large with the Parents' Coalition of B.C., notes that there are few repercussions for people who stretch the truth about their spouse's gun habits. "False allegations are not against the law," says Bailey. "You can lie on an affidavit and you don't get called on it like you do in criminal court. They can say, 'Yes he does have guns and he has threatened me.' The fact is, the more you lie, the more you get."

Regina's Perry Friedt says that an unregistered .22 rifle that once belonged to his grand-father and hadn't been fired in 30 years was still enough for his wife to be able to portray him as a threat. On March 11, Friedt and his 74-year-old mother ended a 16-day hunger strike in front of the Saskatchewan legislature to protest the unfair treatment he believes he'd received at the hands of the province's family court system--including the fact that he has been unable to see his four-year-old daughter, Emma, for a year-and- a-half. Friedt's wife told authorities that, with the gun in the house, she was afraid her husband might harm her. "As a result of the fact that Friedt may have been a danger to her, she was able to have him removed from the house," says Friedt's lawyer, Leonard Young. Friedt's estranged wife told the court that she had filed previous complaints against Friedt, a truck driver, but Young has been unable to locate any records of prior incidents. "My position is that it never occurred, and that she used information that was detrimental to him that shouldn't have been used to further her goals," says Young. On May 14, a judge permitted Friedt to see his daughter, unsupervised, for the first time in 18 months. "I am satisfied that Emma is not at risk in her father's care," ruled Judge Ryan Froslie.

David Tomlinson, the Edmonton-based president of Canada's National Firearms Association, says he receives at least 60 calls a year from men whose partners have claimed, after a nasty argument, that they are worried about the fact that he has firearms. "Police then come and seize all firearms because if they didn't and something went wrong, the media would crucify them," says Tomlinson. "Then they leave all the knives in the kitchen." Once a seizure has been made, it's up to the guns' owner to seek a court order to have them returned. "Going to court, you're looking at lawyer fees of $1,000 to $5,000, which frequently exceeds the value of the [confiscated] property," Tomlinson says. Usually, the husbands have no option but to give up the guns.

But even going out and buying replacements can be tough for someone who has had them taken during a divorce dispute, says Bailey. With the new Firearms Act provisions, passed under Bill C-68, applicants to the federal gun registry require the signature of a spouse--or even an ex-spouse--on the form. And a clause in the act prohibits anyone from owning a gun that constitutes a "real or perceived threat." That often means an estranged wife can stand in the way of someone getting a gun. "When you get a driver's licence or occupation licence, do you have to list the people you've lived with over the past two years?" asks Bailey.

Not all the cases involve wives accusing husbands, says Green; he knows of one case where a man told authorities he was fearful of his wife, blocking her from renewing her gun licences. But in the overwhelming majority of cases like this, the gun owner is male. With what he sees as widespread abuse of the "real or perceived threat" clause in the act, Green says it's only fair that authorities become more rigorous in investigating the allegations. "It's very easy to say you're afraid," he says. "Then the licence is denied and the person has to go to court to prove through medical reports that he or she is not unstable and that there is no reason for the other party to have fears." Green says there should be clear penalties for anyone who knowingly makes false allegations about someone being a threat.

Senator Anne Cools remembers seeing exactly these sorts of problems with the gun registry a decade ago, when C-68 was still being contemplated by the federal government. In 1995 Cools told the Senate: "Law-abiding citizens view the government's initiative, Bill C-68, as creating a thought process which some will promote as the new Canadian morality: to wit, firearms are inherently evil and so are their owners." She pointed out that feminist groups had persuaded then justice minister Allan Rock "that women and children live in a constant state of threat and fear of death inflicted by men with firearms in their homes," and that "central to the belief system of radical gender feminism is the maxim that firearms constitute the phallic symbol of male violence, and are symbols of the patriarchal society . . . [where] the allowance of guns is a sign of misogyny." Again, in 1998, when the government revisited legislation on access and custody issues, Cools says, certain groups made the same case. But, she remembers, there was no data or statistics to back any of the claims of male propensities to violence--only anecdotal evidence and appeals to panic. "The Justice Department has been the leader in social engineering and this 10-year period of time has brought forth a lot of public policy premised on the inherent deficiency of men," Cools says today. "The underlying proposition everywhere is that every man is a beast just waiting to hurt his wife or his children."