I had a weird juxtaposition of posts flow through my Facebook feed this morning.
The first one was this one from The Guardian about thousands of highpowered shotguns making their way into the Australian community
The next one was this article on the Sydney Morning Herald describing recent gun deaths of children, one of them a five month old baby killed when bullets hit the car she was in. In a separate incident, an eleven year old boy shot an eight year old girl because she wouldn’t let him play with her puppy.
The third was this image:
John Howard took over 600,000 out of the Australian community after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 and implemented strict controls on who could own guns and the type of guns they could have.
In 1996, following the Port Arthur massacre, the federal government and the states and territories agreed to a uniform approach to firearms regulation, including a ban on certain semiautomatic and self-loading rifles and shotguns, standard licensing and permit criteria, storage requirements and inspections, and greater restrictions on the sale of firearms and ammunition. Firearms license applicants would be required to take a safety course and show a “genuine reason” for owning a firearm, which could not include self-defense. The reasons for refusing a license would include “reliable evidence of a mental or physical condition which would render the applicant unsuitable for owning, possessing or using a firearm.” A waiting period of twenty-eight days would apply to the issuing of both firearms licenses and permits to acquire each weapon.
Since then, gun ownership in Australia has slowly crept up to almost pre-Port Arthur levels.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how Tony Abbott traded watering down Australia’s gun control laws for the right to take DNA and fingerprint samples from children and the disabled without a guardian present, and the credible evidence that suggests the people this will most endanger is women in abusive relationships and men struggling with suicidal ideation.
And now those guns are making their way into the hands of (mostly) Australian men.
I’ve searched fairly thoroughly, and I can’t find any good reason for this. The gun control laws are quite clear on who can legally own certain types of guns. Police, defence personnel, people dealing with dangerous wildlife like crocodiles have access to the weapons they need to do their job, while, and only while, they are in the process of doing that job. That makes sense. Farmers and people in rural areas dealing with pest control and less lethal wildlife like kangaroos, have access to the guns they need, but again, there are strict controls on what guns they have and where they are stored when they’re not in use. Again, seems sensible.
But the argument for high powered guns available for “recreational use”, as far as I can tell, seems to be along the lines of “because I wanna and you’re not the boss of me, you can’t tell me what to do”.
I understand and have some sympathy for the libertarian argument against regulation of risky substances, like cigarettes, alcohol, drugs or sugar. Such substances are harmful when used to excess, but the harm is limited to the user. The government taxes them enough to cover the costs to the community of caring for the health outcomes of abusing them, provides education to the community on the effects of misuse and makes laws against committing crimes under their influence or providing them to minors. Again, a relatively sensible balance between harm minimisation and overly intrusive regulation of personal choice.
Guns, however, are not designed to only harm the user, they are a weapon, designed specially to cause lethal harm by the user. They are designed to harm others.
The overwhelming evidence that gun control reduces gun death is undeniable. This is not a nanny state argument; it is a responsibly of government to protect its citizens from harm argument.
Again, with the juxtapositions, as the President of a country with no gun control lauds Australia for its strict, popularly supported and effective gun control laws, we are in the process of watering them down. As the public protest against the intimate partner homicide grows, we are providing easier access to a weapon that can only increase that horrifying statistic.
This is not something about which we should be complacent. The gun lobby in Australia has been slowly chipping away at the gun control laws brought in by John Howard for years. It’s way past time to push back.