Shooters aren’t about sport. They’re all about death
Guns are about death and stupidity, not sport and self-defence as pro-gun lobbyists would have us believe. Every pro-gun move brings us one step closer to horror, writes Claire Harvey.
Gun control. Gun control. Gun control.
If the massacre in New Zealand teaches us anything, it is that we must do everything in our power to stop the march of shooters’ advocates who pretend they’re all about sport.
They are all about death.
Death and stupidity. The semi-sexual allure of killing things, animal or human, and the stupidity to miss the fact that rampant guns in society cheapen all of our lives.
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All over the country, firearms dealers and pro-gun advocates are lobbying to have our tough gun laws relaxed, and working to the very extent of the existing regime to bring in guns that are right at the edge of legality.
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The last and most public threat was the Adler shotgun, a lever-action weapon that can fire many bullets in horrifyingly rapid succession.
The federal Government was forced to ban such weapons with more than a five-shot capacity in order to stop the Adler, which had already been imported in its hundreds before the ban.
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Robert Nioa, the leading proponent of the Adler, is at the forefront of the shooting lobby’s flooding of money into state election campaigns, pushing voters to put major parties last and instead supporting outfits like One Nation and, in the NSW election, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.
Mr Nioa is a world away from monsters who conduct massacres. But the policies he proposes would lead directly to high-powered weapons becoming more widely available in Australia.
Gun Control Australia, the lobby group who has been valiantly standing up against the slow encroachment of pro-gun activists, says Australia has significantly weakened gun laws since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when John Howard so famously stood up to the National Party to introduce a suite of new laws including banning automatic weapons.
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That is why we’ve never had a massacre on the scale of Christchurch.
But the wind-back is everywhere. Several states including NSW have wound back cooling-off periods for the purchase of a weapon, which is supposed to be 28 days, and the National Firearms Agreement that was drafted immediately after Port Arthur has still not been fully implemented.
The 1996-inspired laws require gun owners to have a “good reason” for wanting a weapon.
That is now a formality easily chosen from a drop-down menu offering “business or employment” or “animal welfare” and others.
And now, next weekend, the Labor Party — to its shame — is doing NSW preference swaps with the Shooters.
Here is what the SFF want in NSW: “Increasing a person’s right to self-defence”, presumably by allowing homeowners to shoot trespassers without having to prove that their actions were reasonable; an end to the compulsory recording of ammunition sales; more shooting ranges; more taxpayer grants for gun clubs.
Here’s a doozy: Legislation allowing “past and serving defence force and law enforcement personnel to grant licences and registration of firearms free of any fees”.
That would mean any ex-soldier could grant gun licences to his mates, for free.
Federally, the Shooters want “expanded self-defence rights,” more taxpayer grants for gun lobbyists (seriously), a review of the National Firearms Agreement, removal of federal regulation of gun imports and government contracts for Australian gun manufacturers: that is, the blossoming of a local weapons industry.
Shooters cloak themselves in “law-and-order” rhetoric as if claiming to back tougher penalties for gun crime will make them seem reasonable.
Every pro-gun move brings us one step closer to horror.
We must step back.
Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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