STRAIGHT SHOOTING BY GRAHAM PARK, SHOOTERS UNION
The antis keep looking to the past
More laws aren’t the answer
You have to love it when anti-gun types accidentally say the quiet part out loud. That’s exactly what has just happened in Victoria’s recent ‘rapid review’ of its gun laws, headed by ex-VictoriaPolice Commissioner, Ken Lay AO APM.
Much of the report reads like a Gun Control Australia press release, combining the worst parts of the Federal, New South Wales and Western Australian unhinged attacks on guns: mandatory attendances and club memberships, arbitrary reclassification based on how people ‘feel’ about a firearm, mandatory health assessment, and so on. It even says that long arms should be treated the same way as handguns.
The crazy part is that because firearm violence is now so low in Victoria (and everywhere, for that matter), the report has to run a scare campaign based on the distant past, like the Queen and Hoddle Street massacres in 1987, and a 2010 case from New South Wales where a severely mentally ill woman stole a pistol from a club and murdered her father. I’m surprised Ned Kelly didn’t get a mention.
The report has almost nothing to say about gun violence in Victoria today, other than to admit that “the majority of firearm crime involves illegal weapons”. Of course, it then tries to argue that legal gun owners are the problem and that more laws are the solution.
To say the report cherry picks is an understatement. For instance, it claims that more gun laws are needed in Australia because “New Zealand provides an example of how strengthening firearms laws contributes to fewer firearms suicide and homicide deaths over time”.
This was notable after 1992 reforms in response to the 1990 Aramoana massacre. We agree. Except here’s the thing: firearm deaths dropped in New Zealand despite no long arm registration and continued availability of semi-automatic firearms.
Funnily enough, that inconvenient truth doesn’t get a mention.
But among all this, Lay suddenly drops something that gun owners have known for years. He says straight out that the reason police want caps on gun ownership is to “make the system easier to monitor and manage”.
Finally, it’s there in black and white. This is not really about “public safety,” no matter how many times that phrase gets tossed around. Police bureaucrats want to get rid of guns and gun owners because of our gun laws – laws they themselves thought up and continually want more of. They have created such a complex and burdensome system that they can no longer satisfactorily administer it.
The whole mess is crashing down and that fact can no longer be hidden. That makes police bureaucrats look bad, which is the thing they care about the most – it is all about organisational reputation.
The answer is simple: if you want workable systems, get rid of laws that don’t do anything. Don’t add more useless laws on top of them.
Instead, a former cop has agreed wholeheartedly with current cops who think that the best thing to do is more of the same old nonsense they’ve been doing for 30 years.
The laws that Lay’s report pushes for show the same tired mentality we have seen since Port Arthur: make it harder and more expensive to get a licence and own guns and eventually gun owners will give up and go away.
It didn’t work in 1996 and we’re still standing, with more of us than ever before.
So now they are ramping things up even further in the hope that what hasn’t worked over the past three decades will finally click.
We know a lot more than we did back then and as the recent independent economic analysis commissioned by Shooters Union showed, there is no relationship between the level of legal firearms ownership and firearm misuse in Australia today. More guns does not mean more crime.Why still legislate like it’s 1996? All that has given us is unworkable laws that cost billions and deliver little benefit.
If politicians are smart, they’ll realise that doing the same thing over and over again is the definition of insanity – so they will stop doing it.
But in case they’re not smart, it’s up to you to help them – by contacting them directly and providing them with facts, reminding them attacks on shooters will have consequences at the ballot box, starting with your personal vote. 
Graham Park is the President of Shooters Union Australia.