In a divided province, how do guns fit into Saskatchewan life? A Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon StarPhoenix multi-part series investigates. Read our full coverage here[1]
MISSOULA, MT, and CANORA, SK — It’s the last day of Montana’s biggest gun show, and Hayes Otoupalik is angry.
He’s berating a man whose “buddy” has asked to set up an exhibit inside. It would feature — to Otoupalik’s horror — massage equipment.
Otoupalik’s custom-made bolo tie hangs steady as he talks, anchored by tiny replica Confederate pistols at each end. He has run this show for 50 years. He knows his customers.
“They don’t come to look at rocks; they don’t come to look at sausage dressings; they don’t come to look at reproduction samurai swords and fake shit and crap,” Otoupalik yells.
“It’s a gun show,” he insists. “It should be guns and gun-related collectibles and frontier stuff.”
And there are guns here, hundreds and hundreds of them, filling the University of Montana’s Adams Center. There are magazines with 30 rounds, and drums with 50. There’s an Uzi, a handful of AKs, a slew of ARs and a whole lot of love for the Second Amendment, protecting the right to keep and bear arms.
“Every country in the world should have a second amendment in their constitution,” says Otoupalik.
“It gives us the right to protect our freedoms.”
But inside the Adams Centre, respect for the rest of the nation’s gun-control framework is spotty at best.
Otoupalik says he runs a “real clean show.” He has security stationed at the door, armed police officers patrolling the floor and an information booth staffed by two employees of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
Norman Frick doesn’t care about any of that.
Frick is selling Luger
