From the May 2023 issue of Toronto Life
The Way of the Gun
Rodger Kotanko loved firearms: fixing them, building them, shooting them. When one of his pistols ended up in the hands of a murderer, he paid for it with his life. His family says he didn’t do anything wrong. Police say he did. The case at the heart of the gun control debate
A handgun is a finicky machine. About 50 components, some as small as a sesame seed, must work in perfect harmony to send a bullet screaming out of a barrel at 1,100 kilometres per hour. If any one of these screws, springs, pins or plugs is even a millimetre out of place, a gun may misfire or jam. If things are really out of whack, it will blow up in your hand.
To keep their firearms in tip-top condition, hundreds of hunters, police officers, soldiers and sport shooters across southern Ontario trusted a grizzled septuagenarian gunsmith named Rodger Kotanko. He wore the same outfit every day: work boots, jogging pants, a T-shirt and a frayed plaid button-up. He operated at a sloth’s pace, but his knowledge of firearms was encyclopedic. Whatever the problem, he could fix it.
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