The Task Ahead
It is important for us in Gun Control Australia to make a critical assessment of the new gun laws. There is no doubt that major improvements to gun laws have taken place. One only has to note that now there is a national gun registration scheme, gun law uniformity throughout the nation, and much stricter arrangements for the ownership of the most dangerous weapons. But there are serious weaknesses in the new gun laws.
The first echelon of weaknesses were introduced by the police ministers themselves by way of concessions to gun owners.
The concessions to members of the Australian Clay Target Association (ACTA).
This concession allows existing members of ACTA to use semi-auto and pump action shotguns in defiance of the category C prohibition for such weapons. It also allows new ACTA members to use such guns if they can show a physical reason to do so. I believe this is a sop of the worst kind to the claybird fraternity.
The weakening of the requirement for hunters to have written permission to shoot.
By permitting hunters to obtain a 'one-off' letter of approval to shoot, from a landowner, the police ministers have opened old- fashioned free for all hunting procedures. The idea that hunters have to obtain a landowner's written permission whenever they wish to hunt game or feral pests was one of the strongest aspects of the proposed legislation.
The most dangerous guns are hunting guns which are stored in the home, but available for domestic impropriety. The police ministers have done the public a great disservice by allowing lifetime hunting approval to be given.
Occupational Concessions for guns which would otherwise be prohibited.
By making it possible for landowners to use category C weapons if they obtain approval for feral pest reduction, the police ministers have once again let the public down. We believe that self-loading guns are not required for such purposes and this concession is a sop to the farming community. This concession has been magnified by allowing such approvals to take part in joint shoots on other farming properties.
Another complaint which could be made about the new gun laws is the legitimacy which many gun clubs have now accrued.
By declaring that membership of a well-known gun club constitutes a genuine reason to own guns, the police ministers have made an extraordinary concession to the gun lobby. It now means that merely by paying a yearly subscription of perhaps $40 to $50 automatically proves that he or she is entitled to own a gun. This is deplorable. The police ministers have taken the easy out and in the process have ensured that gun clubs will increase in size and have more people and resource strength to combat stricter gun laws. It also implies that membership of a gun entitles a person to a quasi-right to own a gun and places the gun clubs on a new pedestal of legitimacy.
There are more serious weaknesses in the gun laws however than the above three concessions.
The police ministers, the premiers and the federal government were convinced that the new gun laws would stop Australia taking the American path. To the extent that there is now a clearer understandin
g that gun ownership is not a right, and to the extent that the new laws will slow the rate of gun proliferation, the politicians are correct. But the American gun problem largely arises from the high percentage of homes in the US where there is a gun. Nothing was done to seriously improve this situation in Australia. It has been estimated that one in four Australian homes contains at least one gun. Most gun tragedies come about because of this and the new gun laws have done nothing to reduce the number of guns in homes, just as they have achieved very little about improving the storage requirements of guns in homes.
The police ministers balked at the difficulties facing them in regards to the removal of guns from homes. This was and still is a major difficulty for any regime of gun control, because it requires new concepts in gun storage, concepts which have not been adequately debated. Our parliamentarians could have required that all rifles and shotguns be stored in a similar manner to handguns, but they were not prepared to go that far. No matter how good home storage is, however, the guns are still where they are easily accessible to the gun owners and where they can cause the most danger.
By concentrating on controls directed towards high power guns, the parliamentarians were in fact indicating that they were primarily concerned with gun massacres and not the vastly more common individual shootings. Aside from removal of guns from homes, could they have tackled the individual shooter problem? The answer is yes, but they had no theory to support them. All this century the gun lobby has argued that it is the person that should be controlled, not the gun. The fact that the gun lobby does not want very strict controls on the person can for the moment be ignored, but perhaps this is one of the reasons that the parliaments did not choose to make greatly improved training and testing procedures the very core of their new gun laws.
Two months after the massacre, Gun Control Australia started a campaign to show that there was a major weakness in the new gun laws. Put simply, the parliaments failed to realise the core importance of a thorough instruction program for those who wished to obtain a shooters licence. While a person only has to attend an afternoon's instruction and pass a 15 minute multiple choice test, there is no real challenge and hence no real selectivity in the shooters licence program.
One only has to read the six Australian gun magazines to realise that many active shooters have become a different segment of the community to the majority, a segment that has a fatal attraction to guns and to the killing process. Above all, they constitute a segment that is ill-disciplined, poorly read and all too often quite callous.
For these reasons Gun Control Australia has always believed that shooters need at least 40 hours of instruction spread over six months if they are to develop sufficient knowledge about their weapons for public safety. We believe that this failure by our parliaments to face the two fundamentals of prolonged training and through testing on one hand and the removal of guns from homes, on the other, will prove to be a severe weakness in the contribution of the new gun laws to community safety.
I conclude with this warning. Despite the considerable improvement to gun laws throughout Australia there are major weaknesses in regards to the ready availability of most guns. No substantial improvements have been made to the laws controlling handguns and the removal of weapons from private homes has in no way been tackled. Finally, gun law legislation still remains with the six States and two Territories. The nightmare still exists; one of the state's might break ranks with the concept of uniform gun laws and then we'd be back with the oldest and nastiest trouble of all.
Of course, private trading in guns still exists and inadequately protected gun shops are spread throughout the land. In short, the task of proper gun control is far from complete.
http://www.edgar-brothers.co.uk/ORIGINAL_SITE/html/home_files/26925.jpg
So why are they objecting to semi-auto and pump-action shotguns,for clay-shooting?
